Tuesday Twaddle
Category Archives: Marketing
Fees Fees Fees
In these “non-inflationary” times, the rates are going up today. This notice came from Vonage.
Effective 09/24/12, the Regulatory, Compliance and Intellectual Property (RC&IP) Fee associated with your plan will increase from $1.99 per month to $2.99 per month. This fee enables Vonage to maintain our commitment to customer privacy, anti-fraud protection and innovation while delivering important new services.
Despite this increase, we are confident that Vonage provides the best value in unlimited calling throughout the U.S., Canada, Puerto Rico and to more than 60 countries worldwide.
Sincerely,
Your friends at Vonage
I applaud a business that can figure out a way to cover their costs and make a profit. I just wish they wouldnt try to spin it as a “recovery of fees.”
Taxes, materials, payroll, advertising and a host of other items are part of the cost of doing business. Business can follow about three paths to keep those costs in check: improve efficiency, reduce the size of the product, or raise the price. Guess what the phone companies do?
Phone companies apparently don’t think we’re smart enough to know when they raise their rates.
For the record? Comcast and Verizon are even worse. They just haven’t sent any stupid emails this week.
There’s An App For That
On this day that we rest from our labors, 23 million Americans don’t have labors to rest from.
Actually, that’s a bad number. The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that “Both the number of unemployed persons and the unemployment rate were essentially unchanged in July. Both measures have shown little movement thus far in 2012.”
142,220,000.
243,354,000.
The bottom number is what the BLS calls the “civilian noninstitutional population” (no, I don’t know how we institutionalized 68 million people, either). The top number is the number of people employed, the “civilian labor force.” What we really know is that 12,794,000 people are collecting up to 99 weeks of unemployment benefits and the rest, 87,340,000 men and women, young and old, either don’t have, don’t want, or can’t do a job.
“President Obama is creating jobs!” my liberal friend Fanny Guay said.
Good spin.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has an anonymous source — popularly believed to be Al Sharpton — who whispered that he has proof that Mitt Romney never paid income taxes for the past 110 years.
Really good spin.
Sen. Reid again refused to release his own tax returns, even as he continued to demand that Gov. Romney make his own public. Rev. Sharpton, by the way, has a new tax lien to pay; he still owes $359,973 to the IRS for 2009 personal income tax. He also owes a total of $3.7 million in city, state and federal taxes, including penalties, dating back to 2002.
My new friend Ashley Proctor has been out of work in Madison, Wisconsin, since the Scott Walker cuts eliminated her job at Wisconsin Community Services.
“Losing my job is partly Gov. Walker’s fault,” Ms. Proctor said, “but it’s really the Koch Brothers who got him elected!”
That would be the same Scott Walker pranked by a left-wing blogger who posed as David Koch in a call to the governor. The blogger published that Gov. Walker was gonna take the money. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) later claimed that the Koch Brothers bankrolled Gov. Walker’s campaign to the tune of $8 million.
Great spin.
politifact.com rated Rep. Wasserman Schultz’s claim False. So did the New York Times.
Meanwhile, Darcy Burner, a candidate for Congress in Washington state echoed Ashley when she said, “Our democracy has been bought and sold by people like the Kochs.”
“So basically the Koch Brothers are the George Soros of the Right?” Rufus asked her.
Ms. Burner wrote an app that helps good travelers boycott Koch Brothers’ products while shopping.
“Oh, wait,” Rufus said. “They’re like Soros except for being on the Right and in that they make their money by manufacturing stuff? So she wants us to boycott the poor schlubs who are actually working???”
Ahh, George Soros. “The Man Who Broke the Bank of England” did it by short selling more than $10 billion in pounds sterling which devalued the pound and in a few days put more people around the world out of work than Bain Capital did in all the years Gov. Romney was there.
In 2005 the French Court of Appeals convicted Mr. Soros of insider trading. The French Supreme Court confirmed the conviction the following year.
Even left wing darling Paul Krugman wrote about Mr. Soros, “[N]obody who has read a business magazine in the last few years can be unaware that these days there really are investors who not only move money in anticipation of a currency crisis, but actually do their best to trigger that crisis for fun and profit. These new actors on the scene do not yet have a standard name; my proposed term is ‘Soroi’.”
Mr. Soros, like Democrat Joseph Kennedy before him, became busily engaged in buying approbation after looting the financial markets so they could run what Sen. Bernard Sanders (S-VT) always called the “good PACs.”
Simply unbelievable spin. Except for a True Believer
Rufus has bought and used equipment from Koch Engineering. The rest of us have probably sipped from a Dixie cup, wiped up with Angel Soft toilet paper or Brawny paper towels, pulled up socks containing Lycra and walked on a Stainmaster carpet. All told, the evil Koch Brothers Empire employs about 67,000 people most of whom have a paid day off today.
Not bad for Labor Day, eh?
My 2011 Labor Day column about how politicians create jobs is worth rereading today. You might also enjoy the 2010 Labor Day reminiscence, Milestones.
Gadget Guy
Liz likes to label this laddie a Luddite.
Au contraire, Ms Arden. We didn’t and frankly still don’t need a microwave oven but I knew I wanted a computer at home since I traded my first box of punch cards for a banner.
I may have been the last kid on the block with a kitchen nuke but I had the first personal computer. See, I’m an early adopter when it suits my purpose. And I lust for a twin-post lift.
I love tools which is the primary reason I have a barn. It has a wall roughly down the middle with a big bay that takes up the entire east half of the building. That main work space has shelving and a welding station on one side and shelving and cabinets on the other with room to work on two cars or to build one 30′ boat in the middle. The other side of the wall has three rooms: a wood shop with table saw and a radial arm saw with a 14 foot feed table; a middle “assembly room” with two workbenches, my rolling tool chest, and lots of drawers and shelves and cabinets; and the “clean room” where I originally built engines but that now is the final resting place for 286, 386, 486, and Pentium-based computers.
I even have a 22′ bridge crane.
That makes me more gadget junkie or tool boy.
Tools separate us from other life forms (sorry, your remote control is not a tool). I don’t care if orangutans can Skype with other orangutans over iPads, I can do it better.
I don’t own an iPad or other tablet (yet) but I did replace my third Palm Pilot with a first generation iPod touch a couple-three years ago. I loved that Palm because it did absolutely everything I wanted a PDA to do. The Tungsten series was Palm’s line of business-class Palm OS-based PDAs. It had a decent color screen, enough storage for my stuff, and would sync with my computer with no more effort than plopping it in a charging cradle. And an app called Documents-to-Go could do almost anything in a business doc I can do on the desktop. Did I mention that my Palm did absolutely everything I wanted a PDA to do?
Except work with Windows 7.
Or play music.
So I “upgraded” to an iPod. iTunes more-or-less runs in Windows 7. Docs-to-Go didn’t work in my iPod’s older IOS but I found a workaround. I could sync my business files and shopping list via Dropbox and open them with an app called Plain Text. And its podcasts single-handedly changed the way I listen to the radio.
I can’t always have the tools I want so I found a lot of workarounds. I have, for example, several floor jacks.
Anyway, Ms. Arden has heard me gunching about how the old IOS couldn’t run this app and couldn’t do that. Heck, it couldn’t even Skype. She thought I needed a new one.
“Get it! Get it! Geddit!”
I hadn’t paid much attention to the ads. Oh sure, Steve Jobs would come out on stage every so often and extol all the gee whiz stuff but I didn’t much care. After all, it’s just an iPod, right?
Well, no. iTunes Terms and Conditions have changed since I accepted them 4 hours ago.
The new one supports 802.11n and syncs by WiFi.
It has Nike+ support built in.
Oh. Never mind. I wear Reeboks. When I wear shoes.
It syncs calendars and contacts with Microsoft Exchange over the air.
I hadn’t really paid attention to the fact that this thing has cameras. I shot video of the concert last night. That blew me away.
It has bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and USB, as well as the usual apps (a browser, email, iTunes, Photos, Maps, Calendar, calculator, and Contacts). And it runs Docs-to-Go and the new Words with Friends. And there’s a feature called Find My iPod touch…
“You really like that iPod, don’t you?” Ms. Arden asked this morning.
Rufus just bought one, too.
Speaking of tools, I also bought a new chainsaw last week. Ethanol-based gas has eaten my “real” saw so I slapped myself a couple of times and ordered an electric. It makes 4 horsepower, needs a 10 gauge extension cord, and has an 18″ bar. I pretty much have to take the tractor to anywhere I need to cut trees so I can run the chainsaw off the generator.
Unfortunately, the Estimated Arrival Date is now Aug. 28 – 30 which means I could chew down the trees faster.
Maybe I could just talk SWMBO into that twin-post-lift in the meantime.
Vetting the Candidates
In about 1969, I set the land speed record between Hoboken, on the left side of the river, and Bridgehampton Race Circuit out near the tip of Lon Guyland. My friend Jabe and I headed out in the dark of night across Manhattan via the Holland and Queens Midtown tunnels, out the BQE to the LIE, and eventually to Route 27. Somewhere along the route, a big motorcycle tried to keep up but eventually gave up.
I was driving Jabe’s then-four-year old, Polo Green, 1965 Corvette roadster. 327/300 engine. 4-Speed. He had traded a Triumph Spitfire that he had souped up with a Volvo engine for the Vette.
That was a fine ride.
I was smitten but a couple of years later, I started driving Camaros and (almost) forgot about America’s real sports car.
Time passes.
I’ve been telling myself that I need a ride for South Puffin.
I want a Vette.
I didn’t even look at the yellow one on the right.
Or one on Craigslist today. That ad for a 1998 Vette proudly says the car is in “excellent condition!” but it does need four new tires with sensors. Uh oh. Four run flat Goodyear tires with a 6-year warranty, the sensors, parts and labor will cost $2,098.04. “Everything else is in excellent condition.”
Ye gods. I’ve paid less than that for an entire car.
“Is it okay if I say I don’t like the styling of that era?” Liz Arden asked me.
Sure.
Generations.1 I admire but don’t like the solid axle C1s, love the C2 Sting Rays, and don’t like the scuttling crabs at all (Chevy called the C3 a “Mako Shark”; I didn’t). Its engines and chassis were mostly carried over from the C2, so the chrome bumper year cars started with pretty decent performance but I disliked that styling and the smog-driven anemic power (they had a puny 305 cubic inch station wagon engine for crying out loud!).
The C4-series that I’m looking at started with a clean sheet of paper. Not as much raw power as the rompin’ 350 and 427 era but great handling, looks that I like, and the advantage that those cars are priced affordably. The C5 and C6s are exquisite, world-class, sports cars but I’m not all that keen on their bulbous lines. Or the $2,000 tire changes.
We drove to Burlington-area to check out an ’86 convertible with low miles. The seller told me it had a “weathered interior” but was solid and that he had cleaned the edge connectors so the electronic dash works again. It will eventually need a new top, he said, and is “beige-ish” in color.
He gave me directions and told us to poke around before he got there, so I made sure to get there an hour before he did. Perfect!
First impression was bad. The car was sitting on the lawn with grass clippings in the wheels and grass a couple inches taller than the lawn under it. The paint wasn’t bad, really, and I liked the “beige-ish” color a lot but it was scratched and a little chipped here and there. Mostly it looked like it had had a run in with a bramble bush. Backwards. I couldn’t get the hood to open or the rear of the top to release. Passenger side hood latch didn’t seem to work and the top latches seemed disconnected from the release lever. Some of the switches were broken. The leather seats had some holes worn in the surfaces. It really really needs a top. All in all, I could see putting a couple-three grand into it to fix the things that needed fixing (and I hadn’t even gotten to the need for a battery or that I hadn’t looked under the car or under the hood) and ending up with a 25-year old, tired looking daily driver. With low miles.
Oh, yeah, and there was a clump of leaves and stuff under the floor mat that looked like a mouse nest.
The seller drove up as we were driving out. I apologized and told him it was just too rough for me.
Oooh! There’s a nice looking ’91 in southern New Hampshire for three grand more.
The owner of the ’91 responded with darned good pictures and a lot of info. He garages it in the winter but parks outside on dirt and gravel when she drives it in the summer. Makes me figure the brake lines, fuel lines, and maybe frame are pretty rusty.
Turns out he bought car four years ago at a New Hampshire police auction. It had been a seizure that served a couple of years as an undercover car and got sold when the cop shop couldn’t keep it running. He replaced the computer before he realized it needed injectors, so it has new injectors and a new ‘puter.
I’m a little nervous about auctions for police cars or seized-by-police cars.
Newport, Vermont, made the news last week when a car alarm from their own parking lot rousted deputies in the Orleans County Sheriffs Department from their quiet Thursday afternoon naps.
Five cruisers, one transport van, and another department vehicle crushed on the concrete like soda cans. And a large dual-wheel farm tractor last seen rumbling down the road and out of sight. Without cars, the deputies couldnt start a car chase, so they set out on foot.
The local farmer and tractor owner was obviously disgruntled.
I probably won’t buy one of those (former) four-door sports cars, either.
Gotta kiss a lot of frogs in this business.
1 Vettes, like iPods and iPads, are identified by “generations.” A Corvette from Generation 1 is usually referred to as a “C1,” one from Generation 2 as a “C2,” and so on.
- C1 -> 1953-1962 Solid axle generation
- C2 -> 1963-1967 Sting Ray
- C3 -> 1968-1982
- C4 -> 1984-1996
- C5 -> 1997-2004
- C6 -> 2005-present