August 16, 2010 by Dick.

A lifetime ago in political terms I ran for state representative. I visited every dairy farm, rich and poor, in our then-two-Town district (Puffin East and North Puffin).

I spoke at some length with Etienne Chasseur, a North Puffin farmer milking about 75 head on 180 acres over on the Sweep Road.

“You need to sign on to the Canadian supply management system,” he told me. “I’m going broke here on an $11 milk check but my brother-in-law up north gets $18 U.S. for milking the same size herd.”

What, is he nuts? Etienne left out some of the story. I didn’t sign on then and would not now.

Vermont is a major dairy state with minor farms. The state defines a “large farm” as more than 600 cows; the median farm here now milks 120 head. Wisconsin, California, and even Nebraska dairy farms often milk 1,500, 2,000, or more. Many more. In 1991, a Vermont cow on one of our 2,381 farms produced about 15,000 pounds of milk per year. By 2000, average annual production per cow had risen to almost 17,500 pounds per year. (There were 11,019 farms here at the middle of the 20th Century.) Farmers measure milk production in “hundredweight” rather than gallons. About 12 gallons of milk weighs one hundred pounds.

Dairy farming here is unique because dairy farmers cannot set the price of milk and cannot pass along increases in operating costs. Neither Etienne Chasseur nor Wisconsin dairy farmer Paul Rozwadowski knows how much his milk sold for until the “milk check” comes in the mail. A month later.

Canada and the EU have a two-tiered system that offer farmers a (fixed) high price for “quota” milk, but a very low price for milk that is more than the quota for each farm. I’ve talked to some dairy farmers in Quebec. One compared his 150 cows to a 1,500 head herd in Wisconsin. Over the last dozen years, he made more total profit on 150 cows than the Wisconsin farm did on 1,500 for nine of those years.

The latest debate over dairy supply management began in 2007 and has picked up again.

The current milk pricing system is “inadequate, unfair and devastating family farms across the country,” Mr. Rozwadowski told the St. Albans Messenger. His last milk check brought in $13.80 per hundredweight for milk that he said cost $18/cwt to produce.

That price is based on dairy commodity sales. The USDA Federal Milk Marketing Order Office monitor the price of butter, dry milk powder, whey powder, and cheddar cheese sold on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. The feds jinker with the numbers to come up with the mailbox price, or the price that the farmer actually receives.

So. What have we learned?

• The government sets the price farmers sell for
• Some farmers want to “level the playing field” by having the government also limit how much they can sell.

Where else could this plan this work? (1) Since the Obamanation owns General Motors, can we expect to see car sales limited to, say, 4 million units annually for all sellers and no more than 50,000 Chevy Volts sold prix fixe $65,000? If GM wants to sell more, the remainder must sell for $3,000 each. (2) Perhaps the feds should limit the oil companies to 15,680,000 barrels/day (about 5 million per day below current consumption) and fix the price at $180/barrel. Any production over the 15 million must be sold for $10/barrel. (3) Next, all manufacturers of men’s knit shirts will be held to 686 million units next year and the price set at $21 each wholesale. Anything over 686 million units must be wholesaled out for $6.

Did any of that really make sense to you?

Things that should be simple seldom are:
Try reading the Federal Tax Code

Got milk? Maybe, just maybe, farmers should look for a better way to price their milk instead of beseeching the feds for yet another set of regulations to hamper them.

Posted in What? Are They Nuts?, Marketing, Politics & News, Random Access | 3 Comments »

August 2, 2010 by Dick.

I miss my landline. Can never find the damn cell phone! the lovely Chris.tine said yesterday. Naturally, that got me to thinking.

I’ve become a VOIP evangelist or perhaps a voipelist for short. A few years ago, I looked at my then-Verizon bill and my dissatisfaction with Verizon-chicanery and realized that technology could save me money.

One of Verizon’s cute tricks in this market is to charge for message units. They don’t use that Jersey-centric term here (they call it “local calling”) but the bottom line is that they charged a long distance rate for calling the next door neighbor and they hid the charge in an arcane counter rather than breaking out the individual calls. I prefer knowing how much it costs me to call Rufus, so that irked me. I hate toll calls. I bought the upgrade with unlimited local calls just to keep my blood pressure in check

At the time, Ma Bell and her progeny cost us about $75 per month and I was paying another $20 or so for dial up Internet access. Remember dial up? ‘Nuff said.

Cable service finally came to North Puffin and Vonage was advertising pretty heavily. I could buy “High Speed Internet” bundled with basic cable TV and switch my existing phone number to the VOIP provider, all for less than the $95 per month POTS and dial up cost us.

Sold, American.

This wasn’t an easy step for a Luddite like me. I just replaced my VCR with another VCR, wear button-down shirts, and drive a ten-year old car and a ten-year old truck. Not simultaneously.

On the other hand I also have a cellphone. SWMBO has a cellphone. I’m thinking about dropping even the VOIP service in favor of those cells alone.

I’m not alone. The number of U.S. households choosing only cell phones surpassed households with only landlines in 2009. Verizon reports that the number of homes with a traditional copper POTS connection dropped 11.4 percent last year, to 17.4 million on their system now. That also means Verizon recently announced it would cut at least 11,000 jobs, people they don’t need to maintain landlines.

The cell phone has come a long way since Motorola introduced the DynaTAC which cost $3,995 in 1984. (Wealthy) users could talk for 30 minutes or so before performing a 10 hour battery recharge in the two-pound “brick.”

One big operator offers discounts to landline-free wireless customers who combine Internet or TV service from the company which, of course, means they still tether you to their land-based infrastructure.

Even businesses are dropping their own landline phone systems, and moving to wireless.

I’m still a voipelist for a few important reasons. I really really prefer using all the house phones because the sound quality is good, the phones are convenient, and anyone in the house can access them. Cell docks don’t do that all that well yet and the speaker phone on my cell is lousy. I call Canadian numbers frequently. We have business contacts, friends, and a dentist north of the border. The cell plans that interest me make Canada a toll call. Remember, I hate toll calls. Oh, yeah, and cell service right here in North Puffin still sucks.

Hey, T-Mobiley! Fix those problems and I’ll dump my sort-of-landline in a heartbeat.

I am never without my cell. I feel naked without it. It was the house phone I would always lose, another correspondent wrote.

I probably shouldn’t say this out loud but I have never (yet) lost a cell phone and I rarely lose the housephone(s). Some of them are hardwired to the wall and the cordless variety all have this wonderful “page” feature. At the end of the day, though, I mostly carry the phone — whether cordless or cell — in my pocket.

The most popular irritation voiced in the surveys I checked is to figure out where the darned cell phone is.

Here’s a thought. One in 50 households has no phones at all.

Posted in Marketing, Tech Toys, Sociology, Random Access | 4 Comments »

February 5, 2010 by Dick.

This is very disappointing. I tried to create a site account for YourOnlineEverythingCheapStore; it bounced me because their software did not recognize our municipality-issued, official 911 street address. There are darned few roads in North Puffin and each one has far fewer than six names. Couriers, common carriers, and fire trucks all have no trouble finding us.

OK, the fire department still needs directions that include “the locust tree we cut in 1976″ but everyone else uses the official 911 street address.

I called the EverythingCheap customer service line.

“It’s a computer problem,” Rachel told me. “We use a service to check for delivery addresses.”

I told her I tried my 911 address and every permutation I could think of. “Can you override the system,” I asked.

“No,” she said. “If we can’t guarantee delivery, we can’t enter it into the system.”

Even if I accept responsibility?

“No.”

I asked if that meant YourOnlineEverythingCheapStore didn’t want my business.

“I guess not,” she said.

Maybe they got enough stimulus money that they don’t need a customer like me. Or maybe they just don’t want customers.

Too bad, isn’t it?

Posted in Marketing, Business, Stupidity | 2 Comments »

January 25, 2010 by Dick.

Last March, Time Magazine noticed that, “Over the past few weeks, the U.S. newspaper industry has entered a new period of decline.” Past few weeks? Anyway, Time reported on 10 major metro dailies that are gone or going. Meanwhile, even the New York Times has dumped hundreds of jobs as employment at newspapers keeps reaching new lows.

Obviously, nobody reads newspapers anymore.

Except I do. As do 44 million other Americans every day.

I wrote op-ed columns for the Burlington Free Press back when Dan Costello was Editorial Page Editor. We also subscribed to that paper for years and I read it regularly. We stopped subscribing, though, not because they stopped publishing but rather because they stopped delivering. They kept billing us, though.

That seemed like a poor business model to support.

The Freep certainly wants my business back. Or someone’s. They used the U.S. Postal Service last fall to mail a beautiful 4-color tri-fold on legal size card stock to “R Harper or anyone else more-or-less breathing at” my North Puffin address. The flier offered 52 weeks of Sunday newspapers delivered for just $22. That’s less than they pay the carrier. [Editorial note: that may not be true. It is true that they tack more than $22 on to subscriber bills for motor route delivery.]

But wait! There’s more! Sign up now and get the Thursday and Friday papers as well!

All for just $22.

The promotion worked.

I was in South Puffin when the flier arrived, so I waited until just before Christmas to take them up on it. I mailed them a check a month ago. I didn’t include an email address on the registration form, but they emailed me at my most private address a couple of weeks ago anyway.

Thank you for subscribing to The Burlington Free Press.

You will receive your newspaper 3 days a week. We’re sure you’ll enjoy everything we have to offer.

And they cashed the check.

The Christmas offer I took advantage of expired 12/27/09. I just received a new one in the mail with the same pitch. The new offer mailed this, the first month of 2010, expired 12/27/09, too.

A month has passed. I looked for the paper religiously every Sunday. OK, I skipped 1/3/10 since we weren’t here but I looked on the 10th, the 17th, and again yesterday. Between the first of the year and today, I figure that makes about 11 newspapers. That makes quite a pile of fish wrap. Or fire starting material. I tried the link to my account they sent in the confirmation email. There was no login button anywhere on that page, on the “contact us” page, or even on the front page of burlingtonfreepress.com. I called their 800 number.

“I show that service started on the 21st,” the Customer Service rep said.

Of this month?

“I’ll send a note to the carrier, Mr. Harper,” she promised. “Let me check the details of your order.” She confirmed my street address, phone number, and zip code and asked me to sign up for automatic billing. I declined. When she read off my very private email address, I asked her to remove it from the system.

“I can do that,” she said.

I reminded her that we hadn’t had a roadside newspaper delivery “tube” since the firebombing incident.

“Do you want me to request a tube?” she asked.

No, I think it would be more productive to schedule an air drop down my chimney.

We both hung up. I puttered a bit. And the computer announced, “Sweetheart, you’ve got mail.” The computer has a little bit of a lisp and sounds remarkably like Humphrey Bogart.

Thank you for notifying us that you did not receive delivery of your newspaper on Thu, Jan 21, 2010, Fri, Jan 22, 2010, and Sun, Jan 24, 2010. We have notified your carrier to ensure proper delivery in the future. Your account has been credited for the missed delivery.

The email came to my very private email address, the one that Customer Service assured us is no longer in the system.

A month has passed since I placed the order. I used to wonder why people think newspapers are failing. I haven’t received a paper. I don’t wonder anymore.

Posted in Marketing, Business, Politics & News, Random Access | 1 Comment »

June 22, 2009 by Dick.

I am, while you read this, driving up the East Coast burning 90% dead dinosaurs and throwing away the other 10% of my fuel dollars on a government scam.

Ethanol is the automotive equivalent of email spam for erection extenders.

You’ve seen the ads.

ED Med proud to offer the world best quality
of erection pills, at huge savings over the brand equivalents.

Ci ialis (only $3 per pill)
Ci ialis Softabs (only $3.33 per pill)
Vaigra (only $1.56 per pill)
Vaigra Softabs (only $1.89 per pill)
Le vitra (only $2.78)

Join our current 5 millions happy users today.

I’ve become increasingly frustrated and it has nothing to do with Mr. ED. We in this part of the blogosphere are doing good things: we’re asking the right questions and we’re honing the good answers.

We’ve known since 2006 that the taxpayer-funded subsidy for ethanol came to $1.45 per gallon. We’ve known for even longer that ethanol cuts mileage at a time the same government that underwrites this non-fuel mandates higher economy and greater ethanol usage. We’ve also known that ethanol laced fuels corrode automotive, marine, and lawnmower fuel systems. And we have certainly announced it.

No one hears us. The Beltway Bandits of the world don’t (won’t? can’t?) listen and 306,711,705 people here in these United States have never even heard of No Puffin (in a wild flight of fancy, I assumed that one thousand peeps have). “ED Med” claims 5,000 times that many satisfied users.

And you, gentle reader, have. You may even agree some of the time.

Unfortunately, that audience of one is insufficient to effect change.

People seem to buy from spam. Otherwise, spammers wouldn’t do what they do.

Are you thinking what I’m thinking?

Posted in Marketing, Society, Science (real), Random Access | 4 Comments »