It’s hard not to get a chuckle from this:

The cheap signs smashed into lawns and along the corners of busy intersections are hard to miss. “We Buy Junk Cars!” ‘’Cash for Your House!” ‘’Computer Repair.” The eyesores have vexed Hollywood Mayor Peter Bober for the past few years as he wastes valuable resources plucking up the signs only to watch them pop up in even greater numbers.

While stopped at a red light a few months ago, Bober studied the unsightly signs and came to a realization that would help him fight their proliferation: The criminals had left their calling cards in the form of business phone numbers.

“These people want us to call them, so let’s call them so much their head spins,” said Bober, who bought a $300 software program in March that makes robocalls to the businesses. The volume of calls has reached as high as 20 calls each to 90 businesses in a day.

Not sure if it’s legal, but I like it if it is. I’ve had that thought before. It’s not like we don’t know who is putting up the signs. The companies in question can say “Hey, that must have been done by some overenthusiastic boy we hired, sorry or whatever” or something, but this gives a particular incentive for them to take it down. There’s little more obnoxious than repeated calls. And unlike tickets, you don’t end up losing money due to court costs (if the businesses are smart, they collect the fines and then go to court and demand a separate hearing on each ticket).

The other day, I actually came to the defense of cell phone companies. Sort of. I basically argued that we are better off with the national consolidations we have than we were in a more competitive market with more local and regional carriers. So I guess I had it coming when later that day my carrier, Verizon, pissed me off. So much so that I am considering returning the phones we have on order and going off-contract.

Our contract ends two days from now. I looked around and determined that yes, we are to be with Verizon for at least two more years. It also turns out that we are due for some cell phone upgrades to finally leave Windows Mobile Island. Android is finally ready for me, or ready enough (more on this later, if anyone cares). So it all works out.

The truth is, I hate being under contract. I avoided it for years and years by buying my own cell phones. But two years ago, Verizon basically made an offer I couldn’t refuse. And then, as now except even moreso, I was sure that I was in for at least a two-year haul. I’m less sure that’s the case now, but still pretty sure. AT&T has raised prices to the point that they’ve lost their price advantage and I don’t like their cell phone selection as much. Sprint and T-Mobile are not options.

So I sign up to extend the contract and lo-and-behold, Verizon has joined the other carriers in offering an “upgrade fee.” It’s $30 a line. Truthfully, I’m paying $200 less than I had budgeted for on the subsidized phones, so the $60 doesn’t bother me in the slightest. But on principle, I am really angry about this. It reminds me why I hate cell phone companies and why I don’t like being tied to any single one of them.

So why does this irritate me? Because they’ve made it abundantly clear they want me under contract. They provide all of the incentives to get me to reluctantly agree to sign on for a period of time in exchange for a cheaper phone. So why are they charging me for something they want me to do? Like it’s a convenience for me to not be able to change carriers or downgrade service for two years? If they’re not making enough money on the subsidized phones plus contract, then charge more for the dang phones. Rationally, this is a distinction without a difference. Except that this way they get to tack on the $30 only after your mouth is watering at the new toy.

I struggle, however, to come up with a rational basis not to move forward. As long as we’re with Verizon on our current data plans for another year, which is a given, we end up ahead. There is the possibility of downgrading Dr. Wife’s plan since she doesn’t use data all that much, but I remain eternally hopeful that she will someday use the phone to its capability. There are various companies I boycott or avoid due to what I consider dishonest, antagonistic, or otherwise bad business practices (Best Buy, HP for a while, and one other one whose name escapes me). This is a reminder that there are no cell phone companies for which this is not the case.

As the header image, I primarily smoke three different brands of cigarettes: USA Gold, Maverick, and Liggett. When I am out of pocket, I will sometimes go with Winston or Camel. When I first started smoking, I went with the gold standard: Marlboro. Eventually I found suitable cheaper replacement brands in Doral and Pall Mall. Over time, both either watered down their product or they stopped doing the same thing for me. The above three are both inexpensive and either reasonably or very strong tasting.

USA Gold is the cheapest of the set. The problem with USA Gold is that it has the word Gold in the title. This means two things: First, they are similar in name to Old Golds, which are more popular, more expensive and less worthy. Second, as with other brands they come in various strengths. They can’t call the lighter variations lights or ultra-lights anymore, so they go by color. Almost universally, light cigarettes have gold color. I prefer red-color. So I have to specify that I want USA Gold 100s RED. If I leave off the red, the gold is in their minds and if I’m not looking, I just bought a weaker cigarette than I intended to. This happened recently. Very frustrating.

Mavericks and Liggetts do not have the weakness problem. In fact, I think their limited popularity is due to their rough taste. Mavericks used to be Harley Davidson cigarettes and for a while (even after they became Maverick) had an awesome black-and-gold box with an eagle on it that would be different in color depending on what you were getting. Now they’re colored similarly to all of the others. My wife hates Mavericks and can smell them from two miles away. Liggetts fall in between the two. They’re the most expensive of the three. Both Maverick and Liggett take a toll on the lungs more quickly than USA Gold.

Living in a small town as I do, I have an internal catalog of what is offered where. What’s rather frustrating is that all of them seem to lack good inventory control. Which is to say, when they run out of boxes, they don’t get more until they’ve run out of softpacks. The fact that they always have left over soft packs suggests to me that that they ought to stock more of those than the boxes. The same goes for regular size versus 100s. I go to the Supply Store a lot, and would get all of my cigarettes from there, but they go months with only the short packs and soft packs, and so they lose my business for weeks at a time.

Way back in the day, when Mom smoked and I didn’t, I did not understand why the hell cigarette brand mattered. They didn’t offer Kent in our home state, and so whenever we were the next state over she would buy a bunch of them. How different can something you’re lighting on fire and consuming the smoke taste? Pretty different, it turns out.

On a sidenote, I don’t think the main reason for my preference for strong flavor is that I have particularly strong lungs (I don’t) or even my diminished tastebuds, but rather because I don’t inhale. Never have. Didn’t even realize I was supposed to, when I first tried them. Which is not the same thing as saying that they don’t get into my lungs. But not through breaking it in from the cigarette itself. The other big reason is my preference for longer-lasting 100s, which tend to have longer filters.

HalfSigma has a post tying together money, class, and race(ism). Obviously, I am going to be focusing on the first two (I may be lightening up as far as this goes, but not that much). As is often the case, he mixes insights with false assumptions. On the latter score, he says:

I think the people who are most opposed to an increase in the minimum wage are those making slightly more than the minimum wage. For the guy making $12/hour, an increase in the minimum wage from $7 to $10 would be a mighty blow to his feelings of success. But people making six figures are so far insulated from making $7/hour that they just don’t suffer the least bit of worry that increasing the minimum wage would lower their own status.

This is, by my experience and observation, entirely wrong. First, because non-minimum low wages tend to go up with the minimum wage in order to differentiate themselves from those making minimum wage. If you’re paying someone 50c above minimum wage, you’re likely going to continue to do so in order to attract the better candidates among those making minimum wage. I was working at near-minimum when it went up from $4.25 an hour. It went up in two increments, I switched jobs between the increments, and both empoyers raise our wages a 45c at a time. Unions, it’s worthy of noting, are generally supportive of minimum wage increases even though their guys (and gals) are not directly affected by them.

The paragraph before and after that one aren’t entirely wrong, but I believe them to be incomplete:

One (but certainly not the only) important differentiator is money. Having more money makes you feel superior to those who have less money. But money just sitting in a bank account doesn’t demonstrate this very well. Thus did Thorstein Veblen coined the phrase “conspicuous consumption.” But you should also be aware that people who spend money seldom think about conspicuous consumption, because a lot of this behavior works on the subconscious level. Driving around in a ten-year-old Hyundai just causes people to have feelings of inferiority when they see other people drive by in more expensive cars. We are less likely to feel envy of people’s bank accounts because they are invisible and there’s a social taboo for people to speak about them.

This paragraph overlooks a different tendency: to roll one’s eyes at those who buy needlessly expensive cars and other conspicuous items. When I see someone driving a Range Rover, I don’t think “I wish I could afford a Range Rover.” I think “Sucker.” As much as I would like to say that this is a result of my being completely oblivious to conspicuous value, it’s not. At least, it’s not entirely so. I bought the Subaru Forester new because it was the best value for what we needed. However, I am extremely self-conscious about it. The appearance of it actually bothers me, just a little. I’m one of those guys who buys new cars. It’s indicative of a reverse snobbery. I thought more of myself because I drove a lesser car. At the time, I attributed it to my practicality. But here I am self-conscious about a car that I bought primarily because it made sense.

Which brings me to another paragraph…

There are other ways to feel superior to other people besides having more money than them. This is what Class X is about. If you voluntarily (or involuntarily) choose a career that doesn’t offer the greatest monetary rewards, then you look to other ways to feel superior. This is what the whole SWPL movement is about, participating in a culture that makes you feel superior to proles making the same money as you.

I am not sure this is about the proles, actually. To the extent that we’re going to psychoanalyze, I think it’s about other non-proles. If you can’t sing good, sing loud. Let’s say that you are someone who was raised in a solidly middle class household. Let’s say that you are not temperamentally or intellectually suited for the rat race. Well gosh, if you forgo the rat-race altogether, then by-golly you are better than all those other sheeple. You may have less money, but it isn’t because you would have fared poorly in the money-making world if you had tried, but rather it’s because you chose not to race. When you can’t compete in set of criteria, choose a different one. Then, per that other paragraph, look down on the consumption habits of those who lack the insight that you have.

I am presently reading Melissa F. Miller’s Irreparable Harm. I didn’t buy it, but rather “checked it out” from Amazon Prime’s free check-out program. The way that it works is that you can check out one book a month. You can keep it for more than a month, if you choose, but but there’s still the maximum of one.

Having a maximum is fair. They want us to buy books and if checking-out becomes too easy, we can do that instead of buying. I totally get that. Here is what I don’t get, though: they should give us more incentive to buy the book. If, for instance, they said “Hey, buy the book that you have checked out and you can check out another book.” It’s the perfect try-before-you-buy. The more you buy, the more you can try. Now, I can take the $4 it would cost to buy Irreparable Harm and buy some other book for that amount, and in the end I will have read two books and purchased one, but I actually think it would be a better to encourage people to buy books that have been checked out. Among other things, it would encourage publishers to allow people to check out their books.

There may be a broader idea here where for every $10 you spend on ebooks, you can check out one for free. That might be an even better idea. I mean, I could see some potential hazard with someone who buys a lot of books reading a lot of other books for free. I’m not sure that giving too much to people who are spending a lot of money is a bad idea, exactly, but even if I am wrong about that, I am still struggling to see a downside to allowing me to get an extra rental by buying the book I just checked out. The author wins. I win. Amazon wins. Who loses?

That’s the case that Daniel Indiviglio made in The Atlantic last year:

If you look to industries where compensation is common knowledge, then you find employees that have far better success achieving more pay. One clear example is Wall Street. At investment banks, salary transparency isn’t encouraged, but bankers and traders just can’t help themselves. After all, many are obsessed with money. So come bonus season, they compare packages and relay information from firm to firm. Industry publications even include league tables to show which banks pay better than others.

Salary transparency is also quite strong among chief executives across the economy. Public companies are required to report this information. Is it any coincidence that executive pay has been rising over the past few decades? Each CEO wants to be paid above average, so pay ticks up.

This brings to mind some causality problems. People that get a lot of scrutiny, such as chief executives and athletes and such, where people are most likely to know the salaries to begin with. This creates not just higher wages, but distortions (at least in the case of CEO’s). Where people are a brand name, and they’re not just paying for actual performance, but for the brand. In the case of Wall Street, people are most likely to talk about how much they make precisely because they’re doing well. At least, I think that’s more likely than the notion that they’re doing well because they talk about how much they make.

I don’t know how I feel about the proposal overall. A few jobs back, at Falstaff where I was working when I started Hit Coffee, we talked regularly about how much we were making. It did not, actually, result in higher wages. It did result in a fair amount of resentment. My resentment, to be precise. There was a guy named Edgar (some of you may remember him) who was… not bright. He was perpetually one of the worst two employees in our department. We started the same week. But Edgar made more than I did. Five cents an hour more. And it drove me crazy. Five cents an hour became an actual point of resentment. Pay within the department was relatively uniform, but for the five cent raise he asked for at just the right time to get it (he didn’t ask for such a paltry raise, but that was all they were willing to give him. But after that, they refused to give anything to anybody). Due to circumstance, I’ve historically been overqualified and underpaid, and that never bothered me like the Edgar thing. We were at the same place, doing the same job (indeed, when I got a promotion without a raise, I was above him and making less).

Even though we weren’t supposed to talk about it, we always did and management actually used this to their advantage. No one could say that Jack didn’t deserve a raise, but they couldn’t give one to him without also giving one to Joe. Yes, Jack deserved it and Joe did not deserve it, but such things are bad for morale. With some exception, I would actually expect pay transparency used in this way more than any other. Not preventing disparities between different jobs, but completely flattening them within departments and job descriptions. This could be good for things like wage equality across genders and such, but from a productivity perspective is problematic. Because it will, the vast majority of the time, breed resentment the more than people know that other people are making more at them at the same job. That some people are more valued than others.

And yet… I am a critic of the status quo of treating unequal employees equally. I have noticed, in my professional life, that over and over again that not nearly enough care is taken to avoid losing the best employees (we can’t give Jack a raise) and too much effort is made to accommodate the worthless employees (We can’t fire Joe, he has a family to support). This isn’t hard policy, exactly, but the way that things often work. At Falstaff, for example, there was the assumption that nobody was going to be able to find a better job, so they should be kissing the feet of Falstaff for giving them one that paid them a solid $10/hr. And yet, at the same time, until the budget absolutely forced them to, nobody wanted to fire Edgar, who had a wife and four kids to support and was an all-around decent guy. So the end result is that, contrary to their belief that nobody can find other work, they lost the ones that were talented and skilled enough to actually find other work, while the Edgars stuck around. My criticism of this is at odds with my apprehension about wage transparency.

There has been a recent spate of articles about lost smartphones. ArsTechnica talks about what you could lose if you lost your smartphone. BoingBoing talks about that and also about ways to protect yourself:

–Always protect your phone with a password or a “draw to unlock” pattern.

–Use security software designed specifically for smartphones to lock up programs on your phone. Some of these programs can be used to help locate the phone, or to wipe its memory from remote locations.

–Don’t lose your cell phone. This falls under the category of “Well, duh.” Nobody loses a smartphone on purpose, obviously. But try to make sure you keep it in you pocket or purse when not in use.

–Companies that issue phones to their employees should make sure to train workers on security, and should secure every phone with passwords.

The last time I lost a smartphone, it was at a movie theater. It had fallen out of my holster (an usher found it and I got it back). Because of that, and a few instances of it jumping out of the holster as I ran, I stopped using that particular holster with that particular phone. That, more or less, sums up my idea of “security.” Wiping a phone from a remote location might become an option, if more sensitive information ends up on my phone. But those locks are a pain in the posterior. Also, as someone points out, how is someone supposed to return the phone to you (if they are so inclined) if they don’t have any information? Well, you can incessantly call the phone, but it actually makes me wonder why contact information isn’t left on the Lock screen. Can anyone think of a reason not to do this? Also, in case of an emergency, where you are not conscious, people can use your phone to contact an ICE number.

These are the rationalizations I use to avoided the dreaded lock screen.

I did want to address something written a while ago at Forbes and that I have seen written over and over again elsewhere. The question of why we don’t expect cell phone carriers to help find lost phones, even though they could:

In short, Nevius notes that carriers in some other places – Australia, for instance – maintain a joint database of mobile phone serial numbers. When a number is reported stolen, the phone is rendered inoperative. That’s not what the U.S. carriers do. They focus on remote wiping, and making SIM cards invalid. But Nevius notes that thieves can simply replace the bad SIM cards with new ones. And he points out that when phones are stolen, carriers benefit as consumer buy replacement phones.

The piece opens with the words “prepare to get angry,” but my anger (to the extent that I have any) is actually directed at the author and people saying what the author is saying. We do not want to make cell phone carriers to do this. While it might be nice if they did… once we place this burden on them (whether by statute or expectation) we are giving them the justification they need to do bad things. Do you know what’s cheaper than helping someone find their lost phone? Refusing to activate phones that they don’t sell you. AT&T and T-Mobile, to their credit, will activate any phone. Verizon and Sprint, however, do not. Even phones that would work on their network. They will only let you activate a phone that they improve. They publicly talk of it as quality assurance, but it’s also a good way to force people to buy phones. Well, with this, we could force us to buy phones from them. The secondary cell phone market allows people to buy cheap phones without signing on to a burdensome contract. Is there any doubt that at least some of the companies would love an excuse to do away with it entirely?

Granted, you could pass a regulation that forces carriers to find lost phones and forbids them from refusing to activate phones that they didn’t sell you, but that might require an act of congress. And if it doesn’t, the fact that nobody who is harping on the carriers has even mentioned the possibility of the above paragraph suggests to me that they are thinking too narrowly and wouldn’t think such a regulation through, throwing the carriers into a briar patch.

TheNextWeb’s Insider has an article aboutbehavioral pricing that I found interesting. The intro:

What if when you bought a new Macbook, the price was higher because your tweets constantly referenced your love and devotion for Apple? What if Orbitz used the fact that your Facebook Likes include “Party Rocking in Miami” to charge you more for a flight to Miami?

This is called online behavioral pricing. It’s a consumer’s worst nightmare as it uses the traces of your online identity to maximize prices on the products and services you want most. It’s also an ecommerce merchant’s dream.

Behavioral pricing is a form of price discrimination. The goal of price discrimination is to maximize profits by adjusting the price that different customers pay based on data about the consumer. Price discrimination is common offline, such as the Museum of Modern Art charging adults $25 but students only $14.

We’ve already seen online merchants make preliminary attempts at this. When the New York Times unveiled its digital subscriptions, it decided to charge $15 per month to subscribe on your clunky old Blackberry, but $20 per month to subscribe on your iPad. Yet, it doesn’t cost the New York Times more to deliver content to the iPad. Instead the assumption was that you, the owner of a $500 tablet, would be more willing to pay than your average smartphone user. But this rudimentary price discrimination is a mere hint of what’s coming with behavioral pricing…

It’s an interesting idea, but far from inevitable. It contains a huge blindspot: price discrimination is held in check by unidentified buyers. You can charge different amounts to different people based on perceived needs, sure. But you have to post a price. And if you won’t post the price until you know who the buyer is, or they set the default price too high, unidentified buyers will move on. The Applyte in the example can simply log on to a different browser and/or fiddle with cookies and see what an unidentified buyer would pay. That sounds like a hassle, but if you’re worried about behavior pricing, keeping a separate browser with high privacy settings for price-checking becomes quite rational. Or, if the prices are so close together that it’s not rational, then I don’t see it as a huge problem.

What the author seems to be talking about seems, to me, to require people to actually be logged in (to a Facebook account, say, or PayPal). People might stay logged in to Facebook, but I don’t think they’re going to refuse to show you a price if you aren’t logged in to Facebook. And PayPal you won’t be logged in to until you’re ready to pay for it. Cookies are avoidable. IP addresses are problematic. Browser histories can be erased. In other words, they can only do this until the consumer gets wind of it and realizes that they might get a better deal by logging out. So if it happens, it’ll more likely be by way of discounts. You start at a price for the unidentified buyer and then, if you have someone that fits certain things, you knock the price down from there. Rather than upping the price for the Applyte, you might actually be better off lowering it because they are more likely to buy more Apple things in the future. Set the price for the unidentified buyer too high, you’ll likely lose customers.

So I guess I don’t disagree that behavioral pricing is a possibility, but I think its application is actually somewhat limited by the unidentified buyer. Transparent pricing has economic utility.

Tangential, but I got a kick out of this somewhat related article:
How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did

And yeah, that does creep me out a little, but in the end it’s about offering people products that they might specifically need. Websites are pushing things based on my browsing all the time. I’d rather see an ad for Thinkpads than tampons.

Forbes’s Paul Tassi argues that piracy is, first and foremost, a service problem:

So, what to do? Go the other direction. Realize piracy is a service problem. Right now, from the browser window in which I’m writing this article, it is possible to download and start watching a movie for free in a few swift clicks.

(This is all purely theoretical of course)

1. Move mouse to click on Pirate Bay bookmark

2. Type in “The Hangover 2? (awful movie, but a new release for the sake of the example)

3. Click on result with highest seeds

4. Click download torrent

5. Auto open uTorrent

6. Wait ten minutes to download

7. Play movie, own it forever

He also cites price. I am sympathetic to this argument, but I have become increasingly less so over the years. In large part because it ignores the existence of the music industry.

Namely, the music industry has something very much like what he’s talking about. Except that it’s a buffet. I have subscribed to Rhapsody since 2005 and with it comes a lifetime’s library of listening. As much as I want, whenever I want. It does require a computer, but if I want to listen to it in my car, I can buy it with less hassle than I can download an illicit copy of it. And now, with Spotify, you can listen to music for free. In short, the music industry has (reluctantly, belatedly) done everything that has been asked of it.

Has piracy abated? I don’t know, but I don’t think it has. If it has, I haven’t heard about it. (Note: I am not saying that piracy is to blame for the industry’s doldrums.) Instead, we’re hearing the same things about the music industry we’ve heard all along. Namely, that they’re just going to have to deal with it.

And you know what? They are. The only way to really crush down on it would be burning the village to save it. Or rather, burning the Internet down to protect their turf. I have my doubts that even SOPA/PIPA would have been sufficient.

Now, to get back to movies, I don’t disagree with Tassi’s plan, in the overall. Not as a way to combat piracy in any meaningful sense, but as a way to make a few extra bucks.

The music industry isn’t actually necessary for music. As music has become easier and cheaper to produce at professional-sounding levels, they can actually outsource and crowdsource their artist selection and focus more on the real service they provide, which is promotion (and, to a lesser extent, distribution). And that’s something of a zero-sum game where everybody can make due with less as long as everybody is spending less (at least I think).

Movies are in a bit of a different predicament, because we need movie-makers and networks in a way that we don’t need the record industry. Good movies, and good TV shows, tend to be pretty expensive. Ultimately, there has to be a way for them to recoup those costs. The good news is that movies have more at their disposal to do so. Initial release. International release. Video release. Commercials on television. Music has other forms of revenue, too (licensing), but it has fewer bases.

So I am not particularly worried about the destruction of Hollywood. And at least tentatively, I am actually inclined to say the same of the movie/TV industry as I do the music industry. A worst case scenario, if it were to come to fruition, though, is far worse for video entertainment than audio. But it doesn’t seem to be affected. While theater movies seem to be getting more and more conservative, (something I might attribute to piracy, if it weren’t for…) secondary movies seem to be proliferating. Look at the average Redbox or Safeway rental stand and you’ll see a lot of movies with recognizable names still getting made. And when these movies to straight to video, that’s a pretty strong suggestion of a strong market for such things, which is precisely where piracy should cut the deepest.

So, who knows what tomorrow brings. I’d still like to see Tassi’s service. Somehow, this is all going to have to get organized. I think it’s unfortunate that the Netflix model has taken the lead on this. Not because I don’t like the Netflix (streaming model). I do! But the all-you-can-watch is problematic and as people get used to it, the notion of paying for individual movies (even at a dollar or two) becomes increasingly foreign. That leaves us in a model where everything is a stable and everything will be spread out between Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and so on. And worse, there will be little in the way of content reliability. You can (more or less) count on Rhapsody to have this month what it had last month. You can’t found on Hulu. Which itself may be enough for people to say “Hey, if I download it, it’ll be there as long as I don’t delete it.”

In the years I have known her, my wife has never had a purse. It’s just not her way. Nor, really, does she tend to carry her wallet around with her. Her wallet is huge and bulky, and she spends a lot of time in scrub pants that are ill-equipped to carry them. Me? I feel naked without my wallet, even when it’s so overstuffed to be uncomfortable to sit down.

So she ends up carrying cash and credit cards along in her pocket. She also changes her pants a lot (she doesn’t like to wear her slacks any longer than she has to and she has to change in and out of jeans and scrubs… meanwhile I wear only one pair of pants a day, sometimes for more than one day, and sometimes to bed). She has a little bit of trouble keeping track of her credit cards. And one by one, because of this and discontinued accounts, they’ve been disappearing. Until it reached the point that the last one went missing and I had to give her mine for her flight back from Delosa. And that one did not make it all the way to Arapaho.

—-

I have a total of four cards from Bank of the Northern Hemisphere (BNH). One is a credit card and three are debit cards linked to different accounts. The problem with BNH debit cards is that they all look the same. When we opened the second account (the joint account from Estacado), I made sure that it was only a Gold account rather than a Platinum so that the card would look different. This until we got to Arapaho and opened another account. We got the Platinum card. The main way I could really tell the difference between my personal account and the Arapaho account was the due date.

One of them expired last month. I got a new one and lo and behold, they changed the design. This was awesome! Except for the fact that Clancy had lost my other card and I had to get that replaced. Meaning I now had the same design on two cards. Not only that, but the same expiration date. So now I have to start memorizing numbers. At least until I order a specialty card or something.

Meanwhile, I fished up all of the replacement cards that BNH had been sending her. I even found one that matched a separate letter with a PIN number on it. So she has her own card. And another card without a PIN. And the BNH credit card that may or may not be activated. I activated my replacement card, which may have activated hers because it won’t let me activate hers without speaking to a representative, and I don’t do a good Clancy impersonation.

—-

Because of the credit/debit card turnover, one by one our monthly subscriptions have been notifying me of a possible discontinuation/disconnect if I don’t put in a new credit card. Satellite. Rhapsody. CBS All-Access.

I’ve never been good at keeping track of my usernames and passwords. So every day has been a matter of checking all of my email boxes to make sure I don’t get a pending disconnect notice.

I sometimes frustrate my dear wife when I leave crucial words out of sentences. It’s genetic. Mom does the same thing. So, without much in the way of context, I will say something like “I’m thinking we should use 53.”

“Absent words.”

“Oh. Sorry. When we go to Alexandria tonight, we should go on State Highway 53 instead of through Redstone.”

Absent Words replaced “What the hell are you talking about?” as a conversational lubricant.

Having been married for a while, though, she is increasingly able to fill in the blanks. Yesterday, I asked, “Is that thing going to be with those other things?”

“Yes,” she answered, “the ovulation kit will be with the feminine products.”

And so off to Safeway I went. It turned out that the ovulation kits were not with the feminine products. I know this because I spent a good half hour looking over every kind of tampon, cream, and gel that I never knew existed in search for it. Finally, I had to do what I always have to do when I am looking for something like an ovulation kit. I had to ask customer service.

It turned out that the ovulation kits were in a separate part of the store. Right by customer service, in the wide open front of the store. With the condoms, pregnancy tests, and just about everything else that kids would not want their parents or neighbors to know that they are buying. I am thinking that this is not coincidental.

Ordinarily, something like an ovulation kit - or condoms - wouldn’t bother me, but this is a small town and not a visit to the pharmacy went by when I was picking up my wife’s birth control where the pharmacist didn’t say “You’re still not trying?” For some reason, announcing that we are trying (by way of purchasing an ovulation kit) is more private than the fact that we’re trying not to. It’s not logical. The check-out girl (who lives five houses down from us) looked pleasantly surprised to see the kit.

My only other real experience purchasing feminine products (except birth control) was in college, when my then-girlfriend Julianne needed me to go to the campus convenience store and pick up tampons. And so, of course, the conversation ended with the clerk saying, as I stood in line in front of about five people, “Now did you want the tampons in the blue box or the green box?!”

Felix Salmon complains about a pricing innovation I had not yet heard of: ATM’s working off a percentage fee rather than a flat fee. Or, as these things generally go, whichever fee is greater. In the case he cites, it’s $3 or 3%.

Look, I’m not going to get all market-worshipper on this, but as far as price gouging goes, this is far less of a big deal than what we put up with at sports arenas, amusement parks, and so on. If I don’t like Holiday Inn’s charge, I really, genuinely can go elsewhere. Maybe this will take up like wildfire and all of them will be doing this and so at some point in the future I won’t have a choice.

Even then, though, the pricing model itself doesn’t seem particularly outrageous. In order to trip up to the percentage-based fee, that means that you have to be extracting more than $100. If you’re extracting more than $100, maybe you need to find the nearest branch of your bank. If anything, I think this fee is to guide people to do just that. Extracting large sums from an ATM machine actually does cost them more money. It means more regular restocking. So I can very easily see why they would be cool with people taking out $40, but wanting those who intend to take more out to think twice, go elsewhere, or pay extra.

Of course it does not cost them $3 per small transaction or an extra $3 for a transaction of $200. But the ATM, the security involved, and restocking all do cost money. Is Holiday Inn making money off the ATM? I would imagine so. Maybe it would be better if they provided it as a cost-neutral convenience. Maybe we should go to hotels that do just that.

But really, there has never been a better time for a consumer as far as this stuff goes. More and more places offer cash-back on purchases to the point that I almost never use an ATM anymore (not even my own bank’s). But more to the point, we need cash a lot less than we used to. $100 in cash goes a lot further than it used to with credit card swipers everywhere. And if there is one benefit to the increasing consolidation of banks, it’s that it’s more likely your bank has an ATM nearby just in case you happen to need one. The last couple of times I did use an ATM it was while traveling. A quick google and a quick drive and no ATM fees at all.

Now, maybe it’s not worth it to get in your car and drive for ten minutes in order to save $3 or $6. If so, that only suggests that the Holiday Inn’s convenience charge is reasonable.

My name has found itself on a new mailing list. Of that I am sure.

What’s curious is that my name on this mailing list is W.S. Truman. I never fill out forms by that name. None of my credit cards are in that name. My Frequent Flier Miles are not under that name. I mention my FFMs because I was recently told it was time to cash them in and I picked up a subscription to Forbes, The Atlantic, and ESPN Magazine. I suspect that one of those three passed my name along. I suspect it was Forbes because two of the three things I received in the mail today came from conservative organizations. One of them, on the envelope, asking a loaded question that my answer to was actually not the one they were assuming I would have.

My mom made a habit out of using different names whenever she would sign for things that could put her on a mailing list. She has four names, so it wasn’t hard for her to do (she used the dog’s name once, and Roscoe received a credit card in the mail*). For a while, she kept track of who put the lists out where. She wrote an great article about it that she published in her local newsletter. It was good enough that it should have been in a more formal newspaper or magazine (I got only some of her writing talent).

* - Yes, this is a true story. It said “Just call to activate” though I assume that calling would have meant a more lengthy process than that. Among other things, to be sure that they didn’t actually give a credit card to a dog.

Larry Downes got a lot of publicity with a screed against Best Buy, declaring its imminent demise:

To discover the real reasons behind the company’s decline, just take this simple test. Walk into one of the company’s retail locations or shop online. And try, really try, not to lose your temper.

I admit. I can’t do it. A few days ago, I visited a Best Buy store in Pinole, CA with a friend. He’s a devoted consumer electronics and media shopper, and wanted to buy the 3D blu ray of “How to Train Your Dragon,” which Best Buy sells exclusively. According to the company’s website, it’s backordered but available for pickup at the store we visited. The item wasn’t there, however, and the sales staff had no information.

But my friend decided to buy some other blu-ray discs. Or at least he tried to, until we were “assisted” by a young, poorly groomed sales clerk from the TV department, who wandered over to interrogate us. What kind of TV do you have? Do you have a cable service, or a satellite service? Do you have a triple play service plan?

He was clearly—and clumsily–trying to sell some alternative. (My guess is CinemaNow, Best Buy’s private label on-demand content service.) My friend politely but firmly told him he was not interested in switching his service from Comcast. I tried to change the subject by asking if there was a separate bin for 3D blu rays; he didn’t know.

The used car style questions continued. “I have just one last question for you,” he finally said to my friend. “How much do you pay Comcast every month?”

My friend is too polite. “How is that any of your business?” I asked him. “All right then,” he said, the fake smile unaffected, “You folks have a nice day.” He slinked back to his pit.

Best Buy is on my blacklist of companies. They’re one of the Evil Corporations. I’m not a fan. I shop there sometimes, but only because I need to and there is no Fry’s around. What’s funny about this, though, is that the one thing Best Buy always did so much better than Circuit City is that they didn’t have the overly aggressive salespeople. I could shop in piece. And honestly, I can’t remember a problem even on more recent trips. So I don’t know if they changed their business practices from when I went there all the time (and the few times I’ve been recently I lucked out) or whether I just come with a “Don’t tread on me” demeanor.

His follow-up suggests that his experiences are not unique.

I also heard from plenty of current Best Buy employees, both via Forbes and through private emails. Best Buy has a strong sales culture at the stores, and some employees took the article personally. I called out some of their (non-obscene) comments on the original post, in part because I think they inadvertently highlight what’s wrong with the company’s current strategy.

Employees, I learned, are strongly conditioned to see every customer who walks in the store as a potential target, one who needs to be coerced into buying something other than what they came looking for.

But you can’t treat the customer as an adversary in a battle of wills. You can’t provide superior service when you’ve been drilled to view each person who walks into your store as prey. You can’t be a trusted source of expertise on consumer electronics when, as many former employees told me, failure to follow the company script means getting your hours cut or simply being fired.

A shame, if true. Since I consider Best Buy to be an Evil Corporation, I won’t mind if they go. I hope it provides an opportunity for Fry’s to expand. Fry’s has a bit of a different business model, with more of a bookstorish emphasis on “kick back, relax, have some coffee!” Of course, bookstores themselves are alleged to be in trouble. So Fry’s might choose to play it safe (one of Borders alleged mishaps was overexpansion, if I recall).

Web’s post the other day reminded me of one of life’s little irritations. To pull down the curtain of fictionalization for a second, one of my previous employers was involved in the photo-imaging industry. You know those kiosks where you get digital film developed? Those. Also, behind-the-counter stuff. Said employer is a relatively major player in the industry, but you have almost certainly never heard of them. Why? Because they house brand everything. If you go to Walgreens and use our product, everything will say Walgreens. Same with CVS. The former #1 player in the industry used their own well-known brand name, but #2 and #3 (who may be #1 and #2 now), one of which I worked for, don’t. Nor does anyone else I am aware of.

As a general rule, I like to patronize former employers. When I can, I get my hair cut at the chain where I used to sweep hair when I was a teenager. Some of it is simple loyalty (a couple employers I feel no such loyalty to, though - nor do I refer to them as “our”). In this case, though, it’s because I know the product back and forth. I know what it can do and I know what it cannot do as well. And it’s a product that I generally believe to be a good one. Maybe one of our (errr, their) competitors is better. But I know what I am getting when I use the product that I tested for the better part of two years.

Except that I never know if that’s what I am using. There is nowhere I can find out if that’s what they’re using. I ask the guy behind the counter and he looks at me like I am an alien. “It says CVS. It’s a CVS scanner.” Well no, it’s not. It’s a conglomeration of products that you purchased for other people. When I print something out on my printer at home, I don’t say it’s a Trumwill Printer. It’s a Canon or a Samsung (depending on which I use).

I get, of course, that they want people to believe it’s theirs. And most of the time I believe it to be harmless when companies did this. My former employer made more money on sales where this occurred, and I liked things that made my former employer more solvent. But for my particular needs, it’s kind of irritating.

Per Bakadesuyo:

A total of 68 15-min. observations of customers’ behavior at a food supermarket suggests that only about 7% of shoppers observe the item limit of the express lane. The averages tended to be about four pieces.

I’d be curious to know the methodology on this. This doesn’t even make sense to me.

If they were measuring people that had more than 10 items, surely more than 7% went through the regular checkout lane by default. Express lanes are usually a minority.

If they were measuring people with 11-15 items, that might make more sense, but how many people have 10-15 and is it enough to really draw from? When I go to the market I usually only have a couple items or a ton.

I may have broken the rule yesterday, though. Our local express lane is actually 15 items and I had… roughly 15. I didn’t check. There was nobody in the express lane. The usual excuses for scofflaws, I suppose. Nobody said anything!

Megan McArdle tweeted yesterday about the dangers of going to the pharmacy on the 1st of the month. I didn’t think anything about it until I was told there was a 90-minute wait yesterday. That’s pretty unusually high, so I guess there is something to it.

Do other nations have pharmacies like we do? Where pharmacists get paid a lot of money to handle the drugs? I must confess some ignorance as to the necessity of all that. My sister-in-law is a PharmD (pharmacist with a doctorate). I should ask my wife. I haven’t seen her but for bits and pieces lately, though.

The image above is from the TBS TV show 10 Items Or Less. It’s funny in little bits, but there’s only so much entertainment to be had in watching a show focused around such… uhmmm… people that have not lead successful lives due at least in part to rather poor judgment on their part.

Coupon Shoebox has a piece up on ways to “increase your frugality” that range from the questionable to a couple that are okay.

Television programming: I have high speed Internet. I have Netflix. This means that I have access to TV shows the day after they air, and that I have access to movies — some of them using instant play with my TV via my Web-connected PS3. So, why am I paying more than $70 a month for TV service?

This one is fair enough… for the time being. But, as I will state more thoroughly in a future post, this model only works because others are paying for cable. If people start cancelling cable en masse, what do you think the odds are that the makers of television programs will take the hit and allow people to consume their product at lower prices? They are already hitting up Netflix hard and Hulu’s free offerings have diminished. Television programming is expensive at least in part because it is expensive to produce. The free (or cheap) ride will only take you so far. If you want TV programming, in the longer run, you’re going to have to be willing to pay for it.

Magazines: We are in the process of culling our magazines. Most have online versions, and there is no reason to be paying for magazine subscriptions when so much of what I read in terms of news and commentary is online anyway.

The same applies here, though to a much lesser extent. Content is not nearly as expensive to produce in the text form as the visual. Given this, I do believe that one way or another, it’s the content-producers that will have to make the adjustments and people in general are going to have to make due with lesser quality. So this one works, more or less.

Paper books: I love reading and I love books. But my husband recently pointed out that electronic versions of books for readers like the Nook, Kindle and iPad are much less expensive than buying hard copies. With the amount of reading I do, it would be relatively easy to recoup the initial cost of buying an electronic reader. Plus, electronic books would reduce the clutter in our home.

Errr, no, the electronic versions are not “much less expensive” than the hard copies. Unless you’re looking specifically at new release hard covers. A much better way to reduce spending on paperbacks is to buy used. Of course, buying used paperbacks won’t let you buy a neat new gadget under the banner of frugality, now will it?

Clutter: Speaking of clutter, we’ve got more of it than I like. I could definitely live without it. We’ve been practicing more mindful spending, so that we aren’t bringing in more clutter, but we could get rid of a lot of the stuff that we have.

Unless you think you’re going to make a lot of money getting rid of the existing clutter, this has little to do with frugality. More mindful spending does, of course, but that’s a thing unto itself.

Meat: I’m not saying I’m going vegetarian. But I have found that I don’t need so much meat. Meat is expensive, and it can affect your health if you eat too much of it. We’re looking into preparing more meatless dishes. This should lower health care costs down the road, as well as mean more money in our budget now.

This strikes me more as health sanctimony as it does frugality. McDonald’s hamburgers can be the cheapest food around.

Christmas presents: With the holidays just around the corner, many are already preparing for holiday shopping. But do you really need more stuff? You can save money by purchasing fewer, more thoughtful, presents. It’s hard to resist the consumer call of Christmas, but we are trying.

Well yes, spending less on gifts for others will save money.

This really isn’t the point of a well thought-out piece, but after reading the opening paragraph:

California police will now be able to conduct warrantless searches of optical disc (DVD, CD, BluRay) factories to look for piracy and seize pirated discs, under a bill just signed by California Governor Jerry Brown (full text). Even those who think copyright law has gone much too far, or cherish fair use, shouldn’t defend such blatant, commercial piracy, which does nothing but deny creators the market for their artistic products. One need only look at China to see how such infringement can destroy creative industries.

My thought was that raiding the factories here will only mean more of the piracy will be done in China. Yet another way our government is pushing industry abroad…

(I agree with the piece, but that was the first thought that came to mind.)

As most of you know, I am a critic of the iPhone. Truth be told, though, if you say that the iPhone is the best smartphone on the market, I won’t entirely disagree. The question, of course, is “best for whom?” For people that want a phone of its type (simple, tightly integrated design, thin, no keyboard, outstanding app selection), it is far and away the best. But that’s sort of giving it a heck of a home field advantage. Tim Lee sums up my thoughts better than I have yet to be able to:

A good way to visualize this is by thinking of a computing platform as a funnel. At the narrow end of the funnel is a human user with an extremely limited capacity for absorbing information. At the fat end of the funnel is “the world”—the collection of websites, devices, people, organizations, or other entities with which the user might wish to exchange information. The job of a computing platform is to connect the two—to filter and organize the vast amounts of information at the fat end of the funnel into a form that is digestible by the user at the skinny end. {…}

This explains why iOS has been losing ground to Android even though most people agree that the iPhone is the best single smartphone on the market. There are tens of millions of people who care most about the narrow end of the funnel. They want the best user interface, and are willing to make compromises on other fronts to get it. Most of these customers will opt for an iPhone. But there are hundreds of millions of customers who care more about some other factor. They want a phone from their favorite carrier, a phone with a physical keyboard or a removable battery, a phone with their choice of app store, a phone they can get for free with a contract, a phone they can get with a pre-paid plan, etc. No single phone (wireless carrier, hardware manufacturer, etc) can satisfy all of these diverse customers. Only a platform designed to support many different phones from many different manufacturers on many different networks can cope with this kind of diversity.

Armed & Dangerous talks about the success that Android has been having:

More interesting, perhaps, is what is not happening in the latest figures. Tragically for the contrarians, it is Apple’s U.S market-share growth rather than Android’s that has stalled. Android share growth continues to bucket along at about 2% a month, while Apple’s shows no increase in the latest figures.

The future is another country, of course, but right now it looks like those of us who thought that multicarrier iPhone was going to be largely unable to fix Apple’s long-term positioning problem were correct. The iPhone’s market isn’t exactly saturated in the normal sense, but sales volumes are only growing as fast as the smartphone userbase as a whole; the multicarrier ‘breakout’ only netted Apple about a 1% competitive gain, and that gain now appears to be over.

Apple is now relying on smartphones for 68% of revenue, so they’d be very vulnerable to an actual drop in marketshare. I’ve taken a lot of flak for saying the company looks like a late-stage sustainer with a principal product line about to experience disruptive collapse, but this is yet another straw in the wind. If next month’s figures show an actual share drop, expect it to be self-reinforcing and get the hell out of Apple stock.

It sounds ominous to talk about how much of Apple’s revenue comes from smartphones. That could just as easily be pointing out the other thing: Apple is actually making money from its smartphones.

There are a lot of questions as to why Google has taken it upon itself to purchase Motorola. Here is Farhad Manjoo’s take:

That’s why I’m betting that this deal will represent a turning point in how Google operates Android. Today, the platform is “open” but chaotic—because phone-makers get the software for free and can do whatever they want with it, Android is available on some good phones as well as lots and lots of cheap, bad ones. In the aftermath of this deal, Google will seek to exert greater influence over hardware companies. Eventually, the deal will help reduce the number of new Android devices that are released every year, and the few that are released will be of generally higher quality—and sell for higher prices—than what we see in the Android device market today.

This won’t happen overnight. Indeed, in a conference call announcing the deal, Google executives argued that the huge purchase won’t change anything about Android. The Motorola division will run as a separate entity within Google. This arrangement is meant to reduce Motorola’s ability to get preferential access to Android over other handset makers that use the OS. This is a signal that at Google, “openness” is still the ideal.

My hope is that Google’s main plan is to create a flagship product. That there are many products and designs that carry different versions of Android is not as much a problem as the fact that there is no real central design that they are all drifting from. If Google can create a serious of flagship products, it would be in the best interest of Samsung and others to fly relatively close to the formation so that the Android apps created for the Flagship will work on their product. Motorola is one of the big makers of Android phones, and with direct ownership over the product, it’s possible that they can be central enough to get the others to “fly right.” That’s my hope anyway.

It also allows them the opportunity to actually make money with their product.

The big news with Apple is, of course, the departure (and likely imminent death) of Steve Jobs. Not being an Apple guy, I don’t have much to say about it other than that I wish the best for him. Despite my disagreements with the direction he took it, he did make everyone take smartphones seriously. Before him, there was serious resistance on the part of carriers because they couldn’t control a smartphone the way that they could control feature phones where ringtones and apps could be required to come from the company store. Jobs didn’t do me any favors, since I was perfectly willing to seek out a product that not everyone else was using, and preferred the niche devices over the standard that Jobs set. But… he introduced smartphoning to a whole lot of people.

However, even though I am not a Mac user and an iPhone user, there was one thing that he did that I loved. One of his “failed” ventures was a company called NeXT, which worked on OSes. In addition to kind of setting up their own shop, they created a front-end shell for Windows 3.1, which was the first Windows operating system that I ever used. Windows 3.1 relied on Program Manager, which was as user unfriendly as it was inflexible. NeXT made Windows 3.1 really easy to use and set the standard for how I would later customize Windows 95 and beyond.

ebooks: Footnotes & Hyperlinks

Since it was discovered that Amazon is selling more ebooks than actual books, there’s been a new wave of proclamations that print is dead and ebooks are the future. Here’s Megan McArdle:

Printing and distributing books is a large industry with significant economies of scale. If too few people buy print books, the cost of the remaining books will start to rise. Eventually, more and more applications will switch to the winning medium, even if individuals miss being able to flip through books. There will be specialty applications, but they will be very expensive.

The problem I see with this is that it does not seem to me that economies of scale are going to be the death of (or cause of irrelevancy of) the publishing industry. Publishing has become more flexible than ever. Print-on-Demand is a growth industry. The overhead on getting a book ready to print - absent other costs - has gotten so low that John Q Public can do it. The more expensive part, really, is product selection, marketing, and editing. These are things that you have to do whether going digital or print. And once you’ve done all that legwork for the ebook, why not offer a published version as well?

So will printing become more niche? Probably so. The gadgeteer in me loves it, but for the fact that DRM means that it’s not just physical books being tossed by the wayside, but actual ownership of the books. But I don’t think that it will ever reach the point of being actually niche. It still offers a product that eBooks don’t. You don’t have to worry about batteries. You can read during take-off and landing of airplanes. You have total ownership (including the ability to trade back and forth as much as you like). And it’s decoration. The first three strike up a crucial difference between CDs and MP3s, though the last part applies to both.

To me, the promise of eBooks is not as a replacement for printed books. Rather, it’s the creation of an entirely new medium. It doesn’t seem like the publishers have really caught on to it, though. The electronic nature allows eBooks the ability to do something that’s much harder to do in print. Namely, hyperlinks.

Never has this become more apparent than listening to the audiobook for the Game of Thrones series. Here you have an unbelievable number of characters and families sprawling all over the Seven Kingdoms. At the end of every book is an appendix giving a rundown of all of the families. Obviously, with a book you can always flip to the back, but with electronic text, you can simply tap on a name whenever it appears and be reminded. “Jacen Bloke, Duke of Westerland, son of Aron Bloke, twin brother to Jaren Bloke, died on the Battle of the Riverfront” and so on (all descriptions wouldn’t need to be the same - they might just need to contain the relevance of the mention).

My first attempt at writing a novel was a little over fifteen years ago, though it took place last year. Because I was dealing with a 15-year leap in time, there were a lot of various things I referred to that the main character wouldn’t explain in his narrative because everybody knows who President Tsongas was. So I used a lot of footnotes. Two of my four novels have, for different reasons, an obscene number of characters. I have an appendix in back to help keep them straight. Of course, it’s hard to put things in an appendix that don’t give away stuff that happens in the novel. Not a problem with footnotes or hyperlinks. I’m still developing in my mind a detective series in a fictitious state. There’s a good chance I would be using footnotes there the same way I did in the first novel I tried (and failed) to write.

But what can be done with footnotes is simply nothing compared to what you can do with hyperlinks. Books have a more standard beginning, middle and end. It’s much easier for ebooks to be fluid, to be able to go back and forth between the main story and background. Some people don’t give a rats arse about background. You could actually give readers the option to skip it. Or, if they skipped it and they wish they hadn’t, a single place they can go in order to see all of the background stuff.

Right now, ebooks are just books in digital format. Change that, and you change everything. You allow for the telling of different kinds of stories. You allow for something that makes printed books really obsolete, and not just because they don’t have a power button.