What is the scam?

When companies make me offers I like to play the "What is the scam?" game.  Usually I am not interested in buying but even if I am I make the assumption that the company is trying to screw me over in some way or other; I am rarely wrong in this.  It is a fun game to try to sort out what their angle is.

Yesterday the phone company called me up to offer me a new deal.  Instead of renting a modem from them for $5 a month they wanted me to pay $50 up front for unlimited modem rental forever including all services, replacements, etc.  Since this is Bell I am sure this isn't outright fraud - they will actually let me use the modem forever without paying more.  What is the scam?

I initially thought that that they assumed I was going to cancel my service within the next 10 months.  Unfortunately for that line of thought I have been with them for years and presumably the average customer isn't swapping around *that* often.  I have a better idea now though; I suspect that they are just trying to get the monthly bill down to make it harder on competitors if I do decide to shop around.  Once they have me hooked on a bill at $40 Rogers could steal me away at $35 but if I buy into this modem deal Rogers has to come in at $30 to make it worth my while in the long run.  Presumably a lot of people who swap companies compare their current monthly bill with the best offer of the competition and this manages to lower that bar just a little.

Bell will clearly lose out on some of their customers who keep their service for years and they will win with a few customers who cancel service before 10 months is up.  I guess they figure that they can make up any difference in greater retention given the lower monthly rate.  It is unlikely that they actually have good data on what this does to retention long term though so I suppose somebody up high in management decided to take a big bet and hope to earn their bonus before any long term consequences could come back and bite them in the ass.

The other possibility is that Bell is going to phase out the use of modems due to some technological change in the next few years anyway.  This would let them get some cash right now and avoid losing out long term because modem charges would be a thing of the past.  I have no technical reason to think this is true but it sure would help them hedge their bets.

A big part of me hates that companies spent so much time trying to confuse and bamboozle people out of their money but a small part cheers; playing "What is the Scam?" is a ton of fun.

Punish them

Canada is all set to go back in time.

Back in time, that is, to an era where informed people actually thought that harsh penalties for minor drug crimes and big jails were going to clean up society and make things better.  In this era though we know that the war on drugs has utterly failed to stop drugs from being available and has mostly managed to spend enormous sums of government money and put a lot of young people in prison.  Prison, we should note, is a place that destroys people's lives and turns minor offenders into lifetime criminals.  If the government were considering how to spend 45 grand a year I wouldn't start out with "Destroy one person's life and push them into serious crime."

That said, the new Conservative C10 crime bill is set to pass into law in Canada.  We will see mandatory prison sentences for growing as few a six marijuana plants and lots of people will end up doing long terms in prison where they can look forward to getting out with terrible employment prospects and lots of criminals contacts.  Wonderful.

It is hilarious when people around the world are looking at Canada in confusion.  Ummm, didn't you guys get the memo?  Lots of other countries have tried that tactic over the past few decades and it has clearly just supported violent crime and been a terrible drain on their economies, not to mention not lowering the rate of drug use!  Nonetheless we are pushing ahead with outdated, foolish laws that do nothing to achieve their ostensible goals and make life worse for everyone.

All this so that Stephen Harper can look tough.  He promised to get tough on crime and he is going to look tough no matter the dollar cost, no matter the social cost and no matter how ineffective it is.  We don't need a leader who is tough.  We need a leader who makes effective decisions for improving the lives of everyone living in this country.  Hopefully a few years from now we will get someone like that but for now we are stuck with spending money to create career criminals so that we can prevent people from using harmless recreational drugs.

Missing the best response

A few days ago Republican radio personality Rush Limbaugh got a lot of press for being exceptionally rude on his show.  A law student named Sandra Fluke testified before Congress advocating that the government mandate health insurance covering the contraceptive pill.  Limbaugh went off on her calling her a slut and a prostitute and suggested that asking the government to pay for the pill was tantamount to asking to be paid for sex, hence the prostitute comment.  Obviously Limbaugh is an idiot but I think the responses to the situation by other people were really interesting.

This being the US the situation is split very cleanly across party lines.  The Democrats condemn the remarks, as we would expect, and the Republicans suggest that the words slut and prostitute may have been ill advised but generally Limbaugh's point stands.  The Republican leadership candidates refused to condemn Limbaugh but rather suggested that perhaps they "wouldn't have used those words" and other such vague evasions.  Normally I would assume that Limbaugh would see nothing but benefit from this sort of controversy since it got him a lot of press but it turns out a lot of big sponsors pulled their advertising from his show because they don't want to be associated with someone who so casually hurls serious insults at people testifying before Congress.

Here is the thing that gets me:  Why didn't any of the Republican leadership candidates offer the following statement?

"While I agree that insurance should cover the pill when prescribed for medical necessity (like in the case of ovarian cysts) I don't think it should be mandatory that insurers pay for the pill purely for contraceptive purposes."


I am a pretty hardcore left winger, especially by US standards, and I can't condemn this position.  It isn't *my* position but someone who wants health coverage to cover health issues but wants contraception to be paid by the user is reasonable.  That is the sort of position I can understand.  It manages to not condone promiscuity (which the Republicans are terrified of) but supports taking care of women's health at the same time.  Right now the Republican candidates are all busy in a race to the bottom to alienate every non fundamentalist woman in the country... shouldn't somebody notice the opportunity to collect a chunk of the female vote?  Or say, the votes of men who care about women?

I don't get confused when politicians lie and cheat to get votes.  I do get confused when politicians refuse to take a tack that occupies a nice middle ground without offending half the voters.  I get it that Republican candidates can't say they support contraception in any form if they want the crazies to elect them but I don't get why they don't try to placate the crazies and score up some votes from everybody else when the opportunity presents.  You can see that sort of behaviour here in Canada, where the Conservatives, despite having a big core of fundamentalists, walk a fine line to try to keep religion / homophobia / racism out of their politics.  They have bonkers policies but they do seem to have the ability to get the middle spectrum folks to vote for them, enough to get a majority government anyhow.

I need to remember, not innovate

Lately Wendy and I have been trying to avoid eating sugar.  The trouble with avoiding sugar entirely though is that we both get snacky in the evening and really want something to munch on.  Carrot sticks are fine and all but if we rely on something like that we will eventually end up shoveling chocolate into ourselves at a frantic pace; we need something that doesn't have sugar but is tasty enough to keep us satisfied.  Enter popcorn.

I suspect that commercial popcorn probably has lots of undesirable things in it as convenient foods are wont to do.  As such we bought a big bag of popping corn, added salt and oil and voila, we have a snack that avoids sugar and is delicious.  It takes an awful lot of eating to fill up on popcorn what with it being 95% air but we eventually manage it as the mostly empty pot below illustrates.

The thing that really got me was that the hardest part of managing to not eat sugar but still have treats is remembering the solutions I already had on hand.  I knew about popcorn but it didn't pop into my mind when I initially wanted to have a snack without added sweetener.  It makes me wonder how much the information available in our society today helps us when we need ideas.  We already know so much and so often we just need a reminder rather than a completely new idea.  The internet is remarkable at telling us things that we didn't know before but is it actually good at helping us remember what we already know when we need to know it?

What we really need, I think, is a repository of information that provides simple solutions for everyday problems rather than the endless reams of data (both true and false) that our current sources of information have available.  Whether or not it is possible to improve the quality and utility of data to the extent I dream of is unclear to me; obviously we can put everything online but I don't know that we can organize that information in ways that are optimally useful for us.

Are people really so awful as that?

On the newsstand today I saw a People magazine cover with the following shocking news:  Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are struggling with their upcoming marriage plans.  Angelina is insisting that the dress be black, that there not be wedding cake, and that Brad doesn't get to pick the ring.  Angelina is obviously trying to sabotage the marriage idea because all of this is so very shocking.

I know that cake and white dresses are the norm and all but is it really so unbelievable that a rather eccentric set of celebrities might alter their wedding plans from the norm in such trivial ways?  The thing that gets me is that I trust the editors of People.  If they put this rubbish on their front page it almost certainly is exquisitely tuned to make the masses go wild.  For some reason the readers of People actually think that somebody choosing a nontraditional dress colour or dessert at a wedding is big news.  I won't even touch that apparently the world is shocked at a woman choosing her own ring...

I had cupcakes at my wedding and I would have been perfectly content for Wendy to show up in a snowsuit, naked or anything in between.  It turns out that the first dress she found that she liked happened to be white and we found chose gold rings though, so score those two for normal behaviour.  The idea of being in a froth over a woman wanting to choose her own food and clothing for her wedding just makes me want to weep for humanity.  Even when People runs front pages that are just "Look who has cellulite!" it doesn't disappoint me in the way this cover did.

Secrets

I am not a big fan of secrets.  I regularly struggle with the conflict between my desire to say everything on my blog and my obligation to not say things that those close to me want to keep secret.  I harbour the conviction that a completely honest and open lifestyle is a great way to make you a happier person; knowing that people accept who you are rather than who you pretend to be grants such freedom and confidence.  This belief often leads me into conflict with people who are extremely attached to privacy, particularly when it comes to the government or corporations acquiring their secrets.  The fact is that I don't mind if corporations or the government know everything about me, I only mind if they abuse the information.  It turns out though that the easiest way to keep people from abusing information is to simply deny that information in many cases so I end up supporting privacy for security's sake rather than privacy's sake.  Unfortunately some secrets must be kept because there is no way to safeguard abuse of the secret once it is out.

Secrets have immense power over the people that protect them.  My view is that you can rob those secrets of their power by exposing them and freeing yourself from the fear of being found out.  The trick is that my secrets do not offend people enough for me to worry about any sort of retribution.  There have been times and places in which I would have been attacked for the truths about me but here and now is not one of those times; I don't know what it would be like to harbour a secret about myself that would be truly dangerous to reveal.  The power that secrets have and people's desperate desire to tell them to someone has never been so obvious as it is at PostSecret.  This is a project where people create postcards with their most intimate secrets written on them and submit them to Frank Warren and his PostSecret project.  He reads them and posts them on his site for all to see.  Some examples:

230 days clean and counting   never fucking again

I can't tell my family the cancer's back.  I'll beat it first.

I'm adopted.  They say "We love you"...  ...But I've always felt like another piece of baggage in the house... just tagging along.

These are powerful secrets to the people involved.  They and the artwork that goes along with them have stories to tell.  The things that absolutely blow me away are confessions like these ones though:

Everyone who knew me before 9/11 believes I'm dead.

I will never be as good at anything as I am at killing people.

Madness.  Clearly somebody could have made this stuff up but I doubt these are fake.  After watching the twin towers fall and knowing that you could easily have been inside wouldn't you think that you could just walk away from your life and leave everyone thinking you died there?  Very few people would want to do that I imagine but a lot of people would see that possibility and wonder. That glimpse into a miserable person's life, that one moment where they decided to leave forever is breathtaking.  I was amazed at how powerful these secrets were and how many people were desperate to tell someone, anyone, their secret.  Read some of the secrets at PostSecret if you have not before - it is an incredible sight.

Sometimes the Sun is right, sort of

The Toronto Sun is the local right wing newspaper.  They are big on Christianity, gun ownership, punitive punishments for crimes and lowering taxes.  A familiar tune to be sure and it is no surprise that I find their reporting to be a joke at best, a travesty at worst.  Sometimes, however, the Sun is right.  A little.  Recently in nearby Waterloo a four year old child drew a picture of a person holding a gun.  She identified it as a drawing of her father who uses the gun to fight bad guys and monsters.  Based on this evidence her father was arrested when he came to pick her up at school, strip searched, charged with illegal possession of a firearm and tossed in jail.  Children's services came in and took his children away for questioning.  Surprise, surprise, the police found no gun at his house.  He had done nothing wrong and there wasn't a tiny shred of credible evidence at any point that might have pointed to his guilt.  The Sun has a report on it here.

I must say I agree with the reporter in his reaction to the story initially.  The police searched the home without a warrant and arrested a man with no evidence whatsoever.  This is a complete overreaction by the authorities and reflects a fundamental lack of understanding of children's behaviour.  If a child says "My daddy hits me" and has bruises, you obviously call the police!  When a child draws a picture of a gun and says "My daddy uses this to kill bad guys and monsters" you smile and nod and move on with your day.  People who take care of children have an obligation to look out for the child's best interests and be aware of parental abuse but they must also avoid taking everything that small children say at face value.  They make things up constantly and often have a poor ability to distinguish fantasy from reality.

The next step is a doozie.  After noting how ridiculous this situation is the reporter goes on to ask "Are we living in a Communist Dictatorship?  I never ask those things lightly..." and from that point on pretty much went pants-on-head crazy.  Just a heads up for anyone out there who uses Communist as a catch all to mean "bad", Communism is a government type that doesn't work.  Much like Democracy it has been stamped onto various nations while retaining no shred of the original intent of the system.  Communism isn't evil, it is just a government type that works for small communities and not for countries; just like Democracy.  Criticizing the systems that lead to this arrest is certainly reasonable but chucking around the word Communist as a catch all slur just makes you look like a uninformed rabble rouser.  Which, to be fair, is usually what the Sun is all about.

Normally I would be suspicious of this if it had only been reported in the Sun but the Star (the local left wing rag which commands little more of my respect than the Sun does) reported in a similar fashion, managing to leave out the Communist comments and the rant about responsible gun ownership.  The question I ponder is whether or not this was a failure at the micro or macro level.  Is the school actually required to alert the police with such shaky evidence of wrongdoing and are the police required to react the way they did?  Are we looking at a failure of judgement on the part of minor bureaucrats or a disaster of lawmaking and liability?  Given my encounters in the past with rules and laws aimed at preventing exposure to liability under the guise of 'safety' I guess it is a mixture of both.  Probably the laws surrounding this issue are foolish and the people implementing them are too desperate to cover their asses at the same time.