Category Archives: Business

If You’ve Ever Wondered Who It Is Government Works For….

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Brucoe, a real man's stuffed animal who takes no crap from anyone, especially cell phone companies
Brucoe, a real man’s stuffed animal who takes no crap from anyone, especially cell phone companies

There’s an interesting situation going on right now in the US Government, and it involves cell phones. From the Wall Street Journal comes a story about how the president is trying to convince Congress that we should allow unlocked phones to be allowed so that people can switch phone providers after their contracts have expired. The interesting part of the story, and the part that most people won’t get, is that this isn’t the first time the president and Congress have dealt with this issue. As a matter of fact, Congress originally made this ruling with a previous law, but made it one of those cumbersome laws that expires, which they often do when they don’t really want to do something. After it expired, these “penalties” were enacted for unauthorized unblocked phones:

The Library of Congress’s rules establish federal copyright penalties for unlocking a cellphone. Wireless carriers can collect statutory civil damages of between $200 and $2,500 per violation and criminal penalties can rise to $500,000, five years in prison or both for the first offense. (from the previously linked article)

Only after a digital write in campaign did the president actually chime in with his own thoughts, backing the people rather than the rich bigwigs in Congress.

So, the question going through your mind should be: For whom does the government work? Because the last time around, Congress did nothing, which managed to benefit the phone monopolies instead of the people, because they realized they wouldn’t be held accountable for doing nothing (a common misconception by Congress). In my opinion, if there wasn’t a write in campaign to the president, I doubt he would have addressed the issue either.

I suspect nothing is going to be done about this, unless people rally and hold their representatives accountable. The telecoms love the way things are right now, even though they claim that they allow phones to be unblocked (so people can switch companies without having to buy a brand new phone), but they don’t make it easy. As a matter of fact, from AT&T’s response to the issue, they have to give permission, even though they claim they probably would. That’s not a right. That’s being locked into a post-contract situation over a phone that your contract actually paid for.

So, if you ever want to know for whom government works, watch how this plays out. People can say and claim all sorts of things, but until you see it play out in front of you, you don’t know how things really happen. Words are great, but actions trump works each and every time.

So what does the sequester mean for the rest of us?

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Sometiimes you have to back up your words
Sometiimes you have to back up your words

I keep reading, hearing and watching doom and gloom stories about how the apocalypse is now upon us because of the sequester. A few weeks out, it was warnings of all government services suddenly stopping on Saturday morning. When that didn’t make much of a dent in everyone’s day, we started hearing about how the Defense Department would have to stop giving out guns and issue recycled plastic sporks to soldiers instead, the homeless would be fed turf grass, and our income tax returns wouldn’t be returned to us until the Year 2375.

Then Friday happened, the two parties couldn’t come to an agreement, and then the apocalypse came upon us. The news stories around then seemed to all have the same point: “The other guys are being really mean to the good guys, and now the world is at an end.”

Now, I understand the whole desire to blame the other guys; we’ve been doing that sort of thing as long as we were old enough to point fingers at other people. One thing we never really learned was how to stop pointing fingers and just get things done. This would be easy if we didn’t have a government that’s so two-sided that they are completely incapable of coming up with compromise. The funny thing is: In Morris Fiorina’s must read book (if you were doing a Ph.d in political science it was, in fact, a must read book), Divided Government, having a government where one side wasn’t in charge (which is what we have now) is the greatest thing ever because that means both sides compromise and work out solutions that benefit the most people. Unfortunately, it hasn’t looked that way for about a decade now, and I don’t perceive it going back to the way things were before. Hell, even Fiorina turned around last election and heralded Ron Paul as a solution to our problems, basically throwing his lot in with someone who had zero chance of winning whatsoever. If our main political scientists have given up on both sides, it can’t mean good things for the Republic.

But right now, we’re in sequester land, which means Monday morning a lot of sober people are going to have to look at the government they’re leading and realize it is going nowhere very fast. Does that mean we’ll start to see compromise, or will it be more of this zero sum crap we keep seeing all of the time where one side has to lose so the other side can win? Instead of governance, we get kids in the playground laughing at the handicapped kids because they haven’t been taught that’s inappropriate.

There are some real issues that need to be worked out, but probably never will because the people who have to work them out are rich, out of touch with the population and more interested in being reelected than they are in making things better. What they don’t realize is that there aren’t two sides to this problem; there are three: The Republicans, the Democrats and then everyone else who has to actually fund these two sides in their esteemed places in government. That third party (the people themselves) often is seen as only signficant when it comes to elections. Otherwise, they’re mostly ignored and spit on the rest of the time.

It should be interesting to see where things go from here.

Yet another job slips through my fingers

Books, Business, Education, Memoirs, Relationships, Writing

I applied for a job where I currently work. I was totally qualified for it, and I would have done a great job with it. Made it to the second interview. And the interview went great. The next week, I was informed that I was “second” in the running, so the job went to someone else.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this sort of thing in my life. I keep applying for things, and way too often end up being the “other” person behind the person who actually gets the job. It doesn’t matter how much education I have, how smart I really am, how innovative I am, what skills I hav e, or whatever. I keep coming up as the second in line for whatever thing I’m seeking. I have news for those who aren’t following: Second place doesn’t get a job or anything else. You get to start over and look forward to coming in second some other time.

I can’t even begin to tell you how many times this keeps happening in my life. And it’s not even jobs. It happened with my writing career where I came so close to finally making it and then something gave me that second place treatment again. An example is that years ago I landed a very well known literary agent who ended up in a car accident soon after signing me on as a client. She had a brain injury where she basically didn’t even remember I was her client. I mean, come on. This shit isn’t supposed to happen outside of bad television shows. I had a second agent years later who felt he could sell my espionage fiction. Then he called me to inform me that he was going to be representing some other writer who would take too much time, so as suspected, I got dumped.

And I am getting older (had a birthday a few days ago) that reminds me that I’m probably less desirable as a future employee than all of the younger people coming out of school.

So, without sounding dramatic or whatever, I give up. It’s not worth trying any more.

“See Price in Cart” is a crappy business strategy that needs to go away very fast

Business, Technology, Television, , , , , , , ,

I received an advertisement from Sam’s Club today that listed a television on sale, but in order to see the price, you had to click it (as it listed “see price in cart”). One click later, I was now on a screen that told me to “add item to cart” AND NO PRICE. That took me to another screen with the wording along the lines of “complete transaction” and a button, AGAIN WITH NO PRICE. The next screen was a couple of listings of what the price used to be, and yet another button to make the sale (without the price yet). Look, I get the idea that you’re trying to get people to want to buy the product and are doing all sorts of psychological games along the lines of “well, if they click this many times to get to the price of the tv, they’ll eventually just decide they have to have it.” This is fine if we’re all multi-millionaires shopping in some boutique where “price is not a concern” but this is freaking Sam’s Club, not some posh place in Beverly Hills.

If you want me to buy your crap, tell me how much it is. If it’s cheap enough that I find it to be a bargain, I’ll buy it. If it’s not, then no amount of “keep clicking until you’re so worn down that you’ll buy it JUST TO GET OUT OF THIS NIGHTMARE” is going to make me pay more money for an item that I’m just curious about.

Companies really need to stop this crap because it so annoying. Customers aren’t lemmings, nor are they people who want to be herded towards your sales. Customers are people you should be trying to attract with good prices, good service and excellent products. Otherwise, your company and its business practices suck. Simple as that.

FTC offering $50,000 reward for someone to come up with a way to stop robocalling

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Now, honestly, if THEY were robocalling me….

The article from PC Mag (here) states that the FTC, frustrated by its own efforts to stop robocalling (translation: Throwing in the towel and hoping someone else can figure it out) is hoping you can figure out how to solve the problem. So, starting next week, you can sign up with the FTC and then upload your solution in all sorts of different ways.

However, I’ll come straight out and tell you how to stop this because most reader responses have been along the lines of “make criminal charges that stick” or “fine them into the Dark Ages”. Those solutions won’t actually stop it because the fact is that they’re usually calling from blocked numbers or from out of areas where we have no jurisdication. The solution is simple: Make it mandatory that phone service companies (landlines or cell phones) allow you to block numbers from calling you if you don’t want to hear from them. Right now, the majority of my advertising calls (that I don’t want) come from phone numbers that if I could block them, I’d never hear from them again. Sure, they could call from another number, but I’d block that, too, and then they’d have to keep paying more and more money to be able to call me. Their best alternative is to just stop calling me as it becomes cost prohibitive.

The problem is that if you have any cell phone, good luck making that happen. I’ve had an iphone with AT&T for years, and they don’t offer the service. It should be standard with your phone, as it doesn’t take any effort for them to implement this whatsoever. When I left AT&T during a short six month period when I was trying something different than the iphone, I was with Sprint, and they didn’t offer the service either.

Because no phone services allow you to do this (unless you jailbreak a phone, which a lot of people like me aren’t comfortable doing), you are forever hostage to anyone who has your phone number. Right now, I am getting nonstop phone calls from a bill collector who is trying to collect for someone named Munroe (sic). No idea who Munroe is, and I can’t get them to stop calling me. Instead, they say: “If this is not Monroe, hang up.” That would be fine IF I CALLED THEM, but in fact they called me, which means that no matter how many times I hang up, they call back a few days later with a robot caller asking for Munroe. I have zero way to shut this down, other than turning off my phone and going back to live in a cave.

The problem I perceive is that there are companies out there who don’t want to give us the freedom to stop these types of calls. That’s why it will never happen. That is why no amount of work the FTC does to come up with a solution, nothing is going to be done about it. If the FTC was serious about stopping this problem, they would have turned to the phone companies and asked them to come up with a solution (OR THEY WOULD DO IT FOR THEM). But the FTC has no backbone, so they’re trying to pretend they’re actually doing something about it when they’re not.

Why I won’t be buying the new Kindle Fire HD or whatever it’s called

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For some bizarre, masochistic reason, I have bought practically every version of the Kindle that has been made. The last one I bought was the Kindle Fire when it first came out. And that device is the reason I have decided to pass on anything in the future made by Kindle.

My needs are pretty simple. What I wanted was a device that could allow me to read books (which it does), maybe listen to a bit of music (which it kind of does, as long as you put your entire music library on Amazon’s cloud), and can place certain documents I need to read onto it as well (that one completely fails). For days, I have been trying to get my Kindle Fire to recognize a pdf document that I need to refer to quite often at work. It can’t. Or it won’t. Not really sure if it has a mind of it’s own, but it won’t read the document, no matter how many times I have tried to make it do so. I sent it using the email address they gave me to upload documents. After establishing that the email account I sent it from was legit, it should have been a breeze. I mean, my old Kindles did it just fine.

But no, it doesn’t see it no matter what I do. The document shows up on my “Manage Your Kindle” page, but my Kindle Fire just pretends it’s a stupid rock whenever I try to upload it/download it/pray to the Gods of Shaniaism, or whatever. It just won’t do it.

The truly sad thing is that my Kindle app ON MY IPAD 2 reads it just fine. But I bought the Kindle Fire so I could use these documents that can’t be read.

And don’t get me started on wifi access. It has the ability to connect with wifi, but 9 out of 10 times, it can’t seem to do anything once it connects. It doesn’t matter if I’m at work, at home, at the Pentagon, in the front lobby of Amazon. When it comes to wifi, they need to stop using a ten year old child hacker to develop their infrastructure.

Which tells me that whatever NEW Kindle they created is as fubar as this one. I mean, this was the expensive baby that the Kindle was selling as the be all Kindle. If they can’t make their best model do something simple, then I’ve given up on them. I’ll still use a kindle app, but I’ll be doing it on other devices, because, to put it succintly, Amazon sucks big time when it comes to making products.

“Rich Dad/Poor Dad” Media Sensation Robert Kiyosaki author files for bankruptcy–Another Oprah-inspired trend of fake experts

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The article

Basically, Robert Kiyosaki, an author I’ve read in the past because I fell for his Oprah-inspired, get rich rhetoric until realizing he wasn’t really saying anything that actually seemed usable, owed $24 Million to the Learning Annex and didn’t pay it, so he lost a trial over the issue, and even though Forbes claims he’s worth $80 Million, he went the bankruptcy route to avoid actually paying his bills. I’m thinking of doing the same thing to keep AT&T from collecting on that cell phone bill they send me every month, but I haven’t pulled the trigger on that one yet.

This reminds me of a story I’ve mentioned before in the past concerning my adventures in South Korea, when I came up against the businessman known as “he graduated from Harvard”. I was working for a for-profit school at the time, and I kept hearing about this infamous Korean businessman who everyone talked about with great respect because “he graduated from Harvard”. Then the school I was working at fell into financial hell, and it was astonishingly bought by none other than the man known as “he graduated from Harvard.”

The whole curriculum was changed because “he graduated from Harvard” had great ideas for what was going to make this school as great as he was. A few months later, a new change was implemented, which consisted of paychecks forgetting to be filled out and management forgetting to answer any of their phones. One of the co-workers at the school (who was new), mentioned that she knew the man known as “he graduated from Harvard” and she wasn’t sure she would be talking about him because she was still trying to get her backpay from a previous place she worked at which he had owned as well. Hearing from other people, I started to discover that the guy known as “he graduated from Harvard” had stiffed quite a few people in the past, and this was most obviously his next attempt at grabbing a bunch of cash and running away before anyone figured it out.

I remember talking to him one day, when he was being heralded around like Caesar after returning from Gaul. He actually introduced himself as “Mr. Kim. I graduated from Harvard.” I said, “Great, I worked on my Phd at Western Michigan University and went to West Point.” He smiled, pretended he didn’t understand me (even though I spoke to him IN KOREAN) and then wandered off to introduce himself to someone else as the great Korean man who graduated from Harvard.

Soon after that, after not receiving my next month’s paycheck (two in a row), I left Korea and came home. Not even sure what happened to that school and the infamous “he graduated from Harvard”. What I found fascinating is that he had an entire life schtick of ripping people off by informing everyone that he graduated from Harvard.

This is the same sort of feeling I get from Robert Kiyosaki after having read his book. I’m sure the Learning Annex has its own version to tell as well. Hey, maybe everything was on the up and up with him, but he’s going to have a difficult time attracting people to his cause in the future. Although if “he went to Harvard” is an example, there are suckers born every minute, meaning that the money flow just never ends.

Our Constitutional rights are decided in the strangest places

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When it comes to the rights of men and women in the United States, quite often the very limitations of those rights are fought in the strangest of places. When it comes to freedom of speech, some of those rights were decided by the Supreme Court when analyzing whether or not pornography should be authorized as a version of “speech and expressioin”. The right to protest was decided by a case involving someone who burned an American flag. Now, taxation is being argued in an equally unlikely place: A strip club called Nite Moves.

Nite Moves argues that its exotic dancers are conducting performance art, and therefore, are not subject to sales tax, because that is a right under its state tax laws if the act can be construed as “art”.

Now, if I didn’t know the “adult” entertainment business as well as I do (I’ve talked before about how I used to design web sites for that industry back when web pages were new), I’d say this is a great battle, and that it’s about time there was a movement to represent women who are often exploited (by both customers, and unfortunately, their employers), but in reality, I’m not convinced that the company involved is looking out for the interests of their dancers rather than their own bottom lines. Unfortunately, that business model has always been that way. This is one of those industries (and I’m not talking about Nite Moves, specifically, as I don’t know their personal business model) where quite often the female workers (who do all of the work that actually attracts customers) are treated as independent contractors for any reasons that benefit the management and as employees when it benefits the management. Let me explain an example: When it comes to taxation, the business holds the girls as independent contractors so they’re not paying taxes on their intake (and other such little schemes), but when it comes to paying them a required minimum wage, they’re independent contractors who are not obligated to pay, legalized employee rights, health care and sick pay. Yet, they’ll be required to come to work on specific days, work specific hours and do specific employee-like things. One of the biggest gimmicks these types of companies do is charge the girls a performance charge (or skim from their profits somehow), so they can’t work unless they pay rent on the stage or something like that.

Sadly enough, this is the kind of atmosphere where this Constitutional fight will take place. Now, if Nite Moves is nothing like I just said, that’s great. Unfortunately, these rights will be fought for the many disreputable companies out there that are that way, and that’s unfortunate, but that’s how many of our rights first make it into the legal process.

Personally, I think lap dancing is one of the greatest forms of both art because it involves not only dancing but acting. The dancing makes sense (regardless of whether or not it’s actually great dancing or just gyrating on a guy’s crotch until the time is up), but the acting is a little overlooked by the industry at large. I would imagine that a young woman has to be one of the greatest actresses around to act like she’s really enjoying giving a lap dance to some loser that equates his interactions with women by how many dollar bills he carried into the strip joint (honestly, I have no idea what the going rate these days is for this, so if it helps the post by replacing “dollar bills” with “twenty dollar bills” I’m fine with that, too.

The Strange World of Free to Play (F2P) Games

Business, Computer Games, Music, Social Networking, Technology, , , , , , , , , , ,

Lately, I’ve been playing City of Heroes, which for those who don’t know it, is a massively multiplayer online persistant world game, often referred to as an MMO, or an MMORPG (for role playing game). Years ago, I started playing the game, when I was bored with whatever other MMO I was playing at the time, and recently, I installed it again and decided to pursue its new play model.

You see, in the old days, the game used to cost $15 a month to play. Now, in order to attract more players, the game has turned into a Free to Play (F2P) game, much like the previous success of Lord of the Rings Online, which went to a F2P model in hopes of avoiding going backrupt. And it succeeded, which has breathed new life into other games that don’t want to go the route of Star Wars Galaxies (which closed shop after not being able to maintain a consistent player base.

The way a F2P model tends to work is that you are allowed access to certain areas, and maybe certain characters, but some parts of the world/universe are off limits or you have to pay a little bit more in order to access those areas or use extra characters. Not really wanting to do the barter thing with every little thing in the game, I subscribed to a VIP membership, which is essentially the same sort of $15 a month I was playing before. This gives me complete access to everything, although I have noticed that every now and then I still buy something that is “extra” in the game.

Which brings up a thing that has kind of bothered me about this model. If I’m someone who is a willing subscriber, I really should be given 100 percent access to everything. Yet, I still feel a bit nickle and dimed in this type of environment. But I appreciate the game, so I have been willing to shell out a bit more money just to contribute to the game I hope to be playing for some time.

Which brings me to how this sort of model doesn’t work. And Blizzard, the makers of World of Warcraft and Diablo 3 comes to mind. World of Warcraft is a pay to play game (P2P), and that’s fine. But the developers (or owners) have become somewhat greedy. They have continued to insert things into the game that they want you to pay for outside of the game. So, even though they’re making a crapload of money for their product, they’re still trying to nickle and dime people beyond the quarters they’re already getting. And don’t get me started on Diablo 3, which is a game that cost me $59.99 to buy (or was it $69.99?), and then they launched the game with all intentions of adding a “pay Blizzard’s greed” auction house, where you will pay real money to buy things in the game.

Years ago, Blizzard was seen as the good guy when it came to games, but lately, I can’t say the same. Diablo 3, for sake of clarification, sucked. It was a crappy game that wasn’t worth the money, the time, or even the energy. The fact that it had the name of two of the greatest games in history as what it was supposed to be a sequel made it even worse. Diablo and Diablo 2 were both great games. They even made the game required to be online at all times, which I suspect had more to do with hoping to get people to feel comfortable with giving money to the auction house model (single players would have never gone online where they’d have to see the auction house every time they signed onto the game) than it was for security or any other stupid reason.

A recent major name in online games is Star Wars: The Old Republic, which I played when it first released and enjoyed it for the first month or so. The game was missing a lot of needed content, so I gave up on it. Now, it’s supposedly going to be going F2P, mainly because they milked every nickle and dime they could get out of the subscription model. I doubt I’ll ever play it again, even though I had fun with it when it first released. The problem with the game was that it was completely on rails the entire time, and an MMO requires a world where you can go anywhere and do anything. That was never part of the very linear model of SWTOR.

Which brings me back to City of Heroes. I enjoy the game and play it a lot. But I fear that there’s this attempt to make all games so-called F2P, when in reality the companies are hoping to rake in dollars through this model. Bioware has announced that Command & Conquer: Generals 2 is going to be released as a F2P game, yet be online all of the time, and there will be no single player game. I suspect it’s going to be a major failure, but that’s just my opinion. I see the reason for such a release is not because that’s the way the market is going but because executives of gaming companies see this as an easy way to separate people from their wallets. Unfortunately, what they don’t realize is that most people who opt into these dynamics are of the older gamer base, and we’re not stupid or as gullible as they’d like us to be. That’s why several versions of this model will fail.

What a lot of these games are forgetting to realize is that what makes people pay to play these games is that they are designed to be fun, not because there’s a free model that they’re attracted to first. That’s why companies like Zynga and anything affiliated with Facebook is struggling these days. People don’t want to be fleeced by companies using them to make money. They want to have fun. And AFTER they have fun, if they perceive that there’s MORE fun to be add by contributing to the company, they will. But holding out a carrot and then giving nothing but expecting everything is going to be the reason why so many of these future properties fail.

And then we’ll start to read all sorts of articles about how no one is buying computer games any more, kind of like the music industry lamenting about how people aren’t buying music. They are buying music; just not from you.

And that’s our lesson for the day. Now, it’s time for me to get back to my superhero Desktop Support Girl, the savior of all broken computer systems in Paragon City.