Slashdot Mirror
Texting Teens Generating OMG Phone Bills
theodp writes "Last month, Washington high school junior Sofia Rubenstein used 6,807 text messages, which, at a rate of 15 cents apiece for most of them, pushed her family's Verizon Wireless bill over $1,100. She and other teens are finding themselves in hot water after their families get blindsided with huge phone bills thanks to hefty a la carte text messaging charges." Use of SMS in the US doubled from 2005 to 2006.
In many situations, it is both superior to and FAR more polite than yapping. I had my first cell phone when I lived in Japan, and I sent and received about twenty messages a day. Talking on cell phones was banned in many locations including public transportation, and severly frowned upon in most other public locations. It was like heaven.
Then I returned to the US: People yap while driving. Yap on the bus. Yap while in line. Yap yap yap, oblivious to the people around them or how annoying (and dangerous) they are being.
I blame this largely on the cell phone providers. It is obvious that a text message is far cheaper for them than a phone call, as the amount of information to be sent is tiny. Yet here in the states, text is expensive, typically the price of a minute of talk or so. In Japan, a text was 2-3 cents, while a minute of talk nearly ten times that. Text was automatically part of any plan that I saw. Such pricing is sensible, given the large amount of data that needs to be transferred for live calls, and the fact that it has to be immediate.
American wireless companies should drop the price of text down to a fair price (pennies) in order to encourage its use. Not only is this the fair market price, but it would help the adoption of a great complementary technology to direct voice communication.
First there was this guy whining because it took more than one button click to bail out of the credit card subscription to an anti-virus service, now it's parents whining because they didn't anticipate that the cel company provided less minutes than their kid uses.
Is it really too much to ask that people read the contract or EULA, and if they accept it, not complain when they find that they made a mistake?
I'm not even remotely Libertarian, but for God's sake accept some personal responsibility for your actions.
Three Squirrels
It's cheaper because if you charge 15 cents for a text message, you can sell 40 bajillion minutes for $8 a century, beating your competitor's 40 bajillion for $12.
The cheap minutes sell the plan, the texting makes the money.
Also, they can. This is how it works with a free market with ridiculously high barriers to entry. It's insane, but you'll eat it and you'll like it.
Though legitimately, I assume there is some overhead involved in creating a connection over and over (finding the customer's current cell and whatnot) rather than just maintaining one, but I can't imagine that actually comes close to making up the difference in price per bit.
But what if you're a good parent and your child is just plain evil? Then it becomes a Catch-22: if you do something, you go to jail; if you do nothing, you go to jail. My Dad had that argument with a judge when I refused to go to school and the judge couldn't tell him what the solution was. Society has no answers for the children who are not perfect little angels. As a parent, you're screwed either way.
When I was still a little kid, my brother went through what we call his "rage" period. He'd get so insanely jealous and angry over the smallest things, he'd get into a fury and break things, smash down my door, and even though I was a year older, he could easily beat me to a pulp. I was so afraid he was going to kill me.
...Okay, so I still say he's an idiot with problems out the wazoo, but that's a sibling thing. But what could my parents have done? They took him to therapy, they took him to the hospital, they punished him by taking away possessions, what else could they do? Hitting him would certainly result in reports of abuse. It really can be that some kids are just fucked up in the head.
Years later it turns out he has a number of mental conditions and it's taken years of therapy, but now he's a semi-normal boy.
What I'm about to say goes against just about everything modern society says to us, but I believe it's the truth:
PEOPLE ARE DIFFERENT. WHAT WORKS FOR ONE WILL NOT WORK FOR ANOTHER.
When I was a child, I was rather... obedient. If my mother said "do this" or "don't do this," I did or didn't do it, respectively (I'm sure if she said "kill a man," I might have had some objections, but thankfully, such requests were rare). I didn't really need much discipline. And when I did, taking away my games or a time out always seemed to make me feel guilty, and I apologized, etc. All in all, physical violence was not needed.
My brother, though, as I've explained, was an altogether different story. Can it be that even though we are siblings, we are quite different, and thus require different methods to develop properly? *LE GASP!*
I theorize (though I am not a psychiatrist) that some kids can learn discipline through a time out. Some may require a little yelling or a slap on the wrist. Some kids might need a good boot or a belt to their backsides. And some kids... well, some kids are just rotten, and no sweet talking or belt slapping is going to change that.
Is this view that bizarre? Whatever happened to "Some people are just naturally selfish jerks?"