Cell Phone Prices
Cell phones are ubiquitous for most people in technologically current countries. Cell phones are almost as prolific as America Online disks, yet, unlike America Online disks, cell phones have not become free, rather, the price of a cell phone has sky-rocketed since inception.
Mobile carries push you to get a new phone every two years or more frequently, they cajole you into going for services that are pointless (TXT, mobile web, GPS), and they convince you that it’s OK to pay hundreds of dollars a month to subscribe to their phone service…yet they also want to rip you off by making you PAY for the phone!
Consider a cell phone bill of $25 a month for unlimited everything. This is far less that what most folks pay nowadays, but will serve for illustrative purposes nicely.
At the rate of $25 a month, a cell phone company will get $600 per year from a consumer. Over the course of two years, that’s $1200, yet they STILL would want to charge you for the privilege of PAYING them for a phone? AND they want to contractually FORCE you to pay them and only them for a period of two years?
Poppycock!
Cell phone companies are ripping off consumers. Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T, ad infinitum. They simply picked up in the digital age where the Ma Bell left off in the age of analog! Even if you don’t remember ever paying to make a long distance call, rest assured, the old phone companies made billions and billionsof dollars off of folks who just wanted to call their family who lived far away. They ripped us off then, and now cell phone companies are ripping us off now.
Similar price points across cell phone companies, coupled with two-year locked-down contracts are clear examples of industry-wide collusion.
So did the Telecommunications Act of 1996 work as intended? It depends.
If your bill for monthly phone service has increased, it’s a safe bet that the promise of more competition has failed miserably.
If, on the other hand, you are scoring record profits from every new gadget and price point your ram down the throats of your customers, then it’s a safe bet that you are reaping exactly what you expected and laughing all the way to the bank. Oh hell, you’re not even going to the bank, you’re doing free wire transfers to Switzerland over telecommunication lines you own! Enjoy the money while you can - you can’t take it with you.
Special Report: Republicans Knew Bullets Cause Death
Recent highly sensitive confidential reports have surfaced across the news media and have sent shock and awewaves across the blogosphere. It seems that Republicans knew all along that bullets, when used properly, actually lead to death. Some historians have even argued that bullets have been killing people as early at the 1100s as depicted in early cave sculptures. Republican leaders have argued that the vase-shaped bombard depicted in the primitive artwork is not a death-dealing device at all, rather it is one of the earliest known depictions of Democracy and Freedom attempting to gain a following in a feudal kingdom that would later transform into a Communist regime and warned us that if we continue down the path of the drastic leftist policies of a veiled Socialist regime, we will lose everything.
Apparently, little metal objects propelled at a high rate of speed through the air have always been lethal but when marketed properly, people will think that they are immune to the effects of these small metal shards entering their flesh. Republicans have also recently revealed that anyone who can run faster than seven-hundred miles per hour will actually be able to avoid most modern bullets fired from any projectile. They even recommended a Nike running shoe and iPod remote to help you avoid bullets while enjoying your favorite music.
Republican leaders also advised that with proper moral instruction, young people will learn that not only are bullets useful tools for problem solving, but they are actually good for the environment. After all, nothing bad ever happens while mining and if we don’t get the metal out of the earth, then some Communist will come along and take it from us.
Obama Tire Gauge
The McCain campaign is currently mocking Obama by sending out “Obama Energy Plan” tire gauges to contributes. I suggest Obama also send out tire gauges to supporters. The tire gauges should read:
“Obama. Simple, common sense solutions to the mess republicans have gotten us into.”
Just an idea… not sure if it would fit on a tire gauge.
Metroid Sucks and Vagisil is NOT Manly
As a wii owner for nearly a year now I’ve yet to feel like it’s a solid video game console. Sure I still have fun with people playing wii sports and to a lesser degree wii play. I even like to pick up some single player monkey-ball once in a while. I’ve yet to try some of the sports games like The Bigs (baseball) and Super Mario Strikers (soccer) and I expect them to be passable but I’ve never defined my gaming experience by sports games and I doubt I ever will. So where are the wii games that I want to play?
I had very high hopes for Metroid, I’ve always loved first person shooters (even on consoles) and I was psyched to use the nunchuck wii-mote as the natural fps controls that they are (I liked the controls of call-of-duty wii, but the game was lame). So along comes Metroid and I was expecting something solid, and maybe it is, but it certainly isn’t fun. I suspect I had too high of hopes, I really expected multi-player. It was on the DS Metroid, why wouldn’t the wii have it? I have no idea. I’d have rather had a multi player only Metroid than a single player only, alas.
Metroid is a puzzle game disguised as an action game and with out a really fast puzzle-solve-time an fps is a terrible interface for puzzles. Apart from the anti-intuitive design concept the game is full of other crappy game things like back tracking and looking for differences in textures to identify hidden shit. I want to shoot things not spend my time combing levels through a black and white filter that requires me to hold a button for about three seconds every time there is something that might be necessary to complete the next section but usually isn’t. Please. In the review by Game Informer (a Minnesota grown gaming magazine) the editor had the balls to suggest that there wasn’t enough back tracking in this game and that the backtracking is what made Metroid special… I’m canceling my subscription.
I guess there’s still some hope. There’s a new resident evil coming, a shooter on rails that looks promising. There’s also a new Fatal Frame being made by Suda-51 the guy who gave us Killer 7 one of the strangest games I’ve ever had the opportunity not to finish. Apart from that powder is of importance.
Since I’ve been biking to work I’ve found that when wearing business clothes during the commute it’s helpful to apply a powder to strategic areas. At first I used some powder I found laying around–Goldbond. I liked the effect but Goldbond has a distinct mediciney smell that I’m not fond of. Sometime later my significant other was heading to the drug store so I requested that she pick up some powder that was a little less mediciney, a little more manly and a little more sexy. She brought me a big bottle of Vagisil powder. She still claims this meets my criteria… I disagree.
GWoT cost? 33,134 Dead or Injured Americans and still going!
The surge is not working.
With today’s helicopter crash, the Department of Defense will add fourteen more to their list. Right now the official number the media’s reporting is
“at least 3,721 members of the U.S. military who have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003.â€
Inver Grove Heights, Richfield, Cottage Grove, Shakopee, Roseville, Fridley. These are cities in Minnesota that all have one thing in common: Their population is equivalent to the number of reported casualties in the GWOT. There are over thirty other cities in Minnesota with fewer citizens than casualties in the GWOT.
How can this be? It’s because the media is reporting the corpse count of U.S. military personnel who have died in Iraq. The media has a slightly higher corpse count than the DoD. But if one were to examine the raw numbers the DoD is reporting, one would simply need to add some columns to get the real casualty report.
The surge is not working.
Total deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan: 4,129 dead U.S. soldiers. This count is not designating between combat deaths and non-combat deaths because after all, the families aren’t any less distraught that their son or daughter died from non-hostile action.
The number of soldiers who were wounded but returned to duty is at 15,751, and the number of soldiers who were wounded but could not return to duty is 13,254.
If you add all three together, the total number of casualties as reported by the DoD is 33,134 (source: DoD website defenselink.mil).
To put this in perspective, it would be the equivalent of taking all the citizens of a large metro-area suburb, killing 4,000 of them and wounding the rest, half of which could go back to their daily routine (albeit injured) and the other half which would require a hospital stay. All of them would likely need psychological treatment.
So when Fox news (the only media source with the headline “Positive Surge Results…â€) or one of the other mainstream media outlets suggests that the surge is working, you can tell them they are dead wrong.
The surge is not working.
YOUR TAX CUTS AT WORK
A bridge in America just shouldn’t fall down.
-Senator Amy Klobuchar D-MN
The Mississippi bridge had a 50 out of 100 rating.
49 would mean it has to be replaced.
Road infrastructure in Minnesota is paid for by the gas tax. Minnesota’s constitution requires that gas tax be spent solely on ROADS not trains, not busses. ROADS! The gas tax in Minnesota has not been increased in 20 YEARS. This is because republicans have spent the last 20 years running on the primary issue of TAX CUTS.
Tim Pawlenty has been vetoing attempts at increase spending on transportation since 2003. The republican party gets support by claiming that raising taxes on gas would raise the price of gas. Consider that Wisconsin pays more than 10 cents more tax per gallon than Minnesota and their gas prices are exactly the same (while big oil makes record profits).
When you hear a republican say “Government is the problem.” Remember that someone needs to maintain food standards, someone needs to educate our children, someone needs to make sure OUR BRIDGES DON’T FALL DOWN. If someone running for office, for a place in government says “GOVERNMENT IS THE PROBLEM” how can we expect them to govern well? Obviously we can’t.
Japanese Bikini Rodeo Pie Fight
We all need this channel:
Dear Alberto, We Don’t Trust You.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales gave testimony in front of congress today and was presented with a recent poll stating that a majority of American’s (53%) lack confidence in him and believe he should resign. He stated that he wasn’t aware of the poll and that he didn’t believe it.
As an American I certainly don’t believe he’s capable of prosecuting anything in a non-partisan way. I’m also concerned that he’s eroding our civil liberties and guilty of getting in front of the Senate and now Congress and lying through his teeth.
I think we should all contact the attorney general and let him know that we don’t have confidence in him, that he should step down and turn himself into the authorities for abusing his office for partisan purposes. Here’s his contact info:
Email: AskDOJ@usdoj.gov.
If you feel extra motivated you can give him a call and let him know how much he sucks: 202-353-1555
In addition here’s his address if you wish to longhand a message to him:
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night!
Scientists have announced that a new rock floating through space, Gliese 581 c may be a habitable planet. If this is the case, we will need to start thinking about ways to get there. Hell, we’ve been thinking about it as a species for years but we need to put aside social and political differences and really work toward finding a way to migrate to a new habitable planet. We don’t even need to live there really. We just need to be able to grow food on the planet until we find more planets capable of sustaining life.
Once we discover a planet capable of supporting farming, we can send our robo-workers to do do all the heavy lifting and humans will make future livings as Teamsters. Only we’ll all be piloting space ships delivering foodstuffs and repair parts back and forth. Ice Pirates anyone? It may have been an entertaining farce in 1984, but if we as the human race want to go out with a bang, not a whimper, then we really need to start making real progress into deep-space exploration and migration.
We need inter-galactic spaceships capable of traversing millions of miles a la Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek.
Think of it as science fiction if you must…but things change. Sometimes, fantastic stories that were once considered fiction lead to discovery.
A Pirate Looks At 70
Lando Calrissian turns 70 today. I can’t even believe it.