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If You Lived In Riga, You Wouldn't Bother To Cut the Cord
lpress writes "If you lived in Riga, Latvia, you would not have to 'cut the cord' to see video entertainment at a reasonable cost. You would simply get a triple play subscription with 20 Mbps up and 5 Mbps down from service provider Balti-Com for $25.43 USD. Balti-Com had the lowest triple pay price in a New America Foundation report, The Cost of Connectivity, which compares prices charged by 885 ISPs in 22 cities worldwide. The report found that five of the cheapest 15 triple-play offerings were in Paris — the fruit of competition between ISPs. With the Telecommunication Act of 1966, the U.S. Congress hoped to foster similar competition, but failed. As study co-author Benjamin Lennett says, U.S. telephone and cable companies have arranged a 'negotiated truce' in which cable incumbents enjoy a de facto monopoly on high-speed broadband service, while Verizon and AT&T focus primarily on their wireless platforms."
that includes mobile phone service (since 20 channels of TV are public anyway) where we get some good deals.
For 24.99€/mo with no contract (can cancel immediately), we get 16/1 service (including a WLAN router), standard telephone (anywhere in Germany free to a land line) and the O2 mobile phones for free (we choose to pay an extra 5€/mo for 500 minutes to the EU/US long-distance because I call the US quite often), and 4 SIM cards with numbers and .15€/min and .15€/SMS.
If you agree to a 24-month contract the price is only 14.99€/mo
:D
Triple play is a all-in-one package with DSL, TV over DSL and VOIP.
In France we also have quadruple play : Triple play + cell phone for 1 h/60 SMS for 1 € more without contract.
As you can call all cells for free from your landline (and even abroad), it is really cheap (eg 37 €/month).
And for 16 €/month I get unlimided voice and SMS plus 3 Go of data.
Hurra for communist France, and thanks to Free (www.free.fr) for breaking the cartel of french telecoms.
And to bring the comparison full circle, the Big Mac Index from January 2012 showed Latvia to be -30% parity. Meaning if you were to adjust the price to US Dollars it would cost an equivalent of about US$15-16 in the US.
The index can be found here:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/01/daily-chart-3
---- Fight to protect your right to keep and arm bears! ummmm... ya I think that's right....
Doing illegal things as a corporation works kind of like raising in poker. In poker, if you raise you have two ways to win. You could have the strongest hand, of course. That one's pretty easy. But you could have a weaker hand than your opponent and he might still fold because he's not confident he can beat you.
It's a little different as a corporation, but if you do something illegal you could just get away with it and make a ton of money. Or you could get caught and fined. From what I've seen, the fines are always less (sometimes FAR less) than the illegal profit you made. Something to keep in mind when, as a CEO, you're faced with a choice between contaminating an entire town with asbestos and making ONE BILLION DOLLARS...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
It's so obviously collusion. In my neck of the woods, no two cable companies compete. You can get one if you live HERE and the other if you live THERE. This is not capitalism and they should be forced through legislation to compete.
It's called "regulation" .. aka law and order for corporations. Sure, criminals don't like law and order.. so what's new in that? They'd much rather be left alone to play freely in a green field of their id's desires.
From financial deregulation, deregulation in other industries and a general lack of oversight and enforcement we have gotten the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl , the S&L melt down, the Long Term Capital Management melt down, the 2008 crash and global warming. The cumulative bill to the rest of us so some tiny minority can profit obscenely runs into the trillions, a bill the rest of us have to pay.. This is also known as a Grover Norquist Tax, the tax the rest of us pay for deregulatory policies and the destruction they cause. .
Well, I've been taxed enough. I'm sick of paying the bill for dereguation and I WANT MY MONEY BACK from the small set of libertarian and conservative personalities and lawmakers that took it away and gave it to the coke snorting class.
The fact is, most Americans don't save because there is no financial incentive to save. Cash is a "hot potato" that needs to be spent and invested in -something- or else you take a guaranteed loss.
I have heard this a lot, but thinking about it now, I think low interest has little bearing on the average person's saving / spending habits. For people who are already saving, it probably changes the instruments they use to preserve their wealth, but I don't think the average person/family is living paycheck to paycheck because they are worried that the purchasing power of their money will not endure if they hang on to it. People get themselves into a position where they end up giving most of their pay to service debt, and I think this is very rarely if ever done because they are being smart and not holding onto the "hot potato" that is cash.
If your argument was correct, I think you would see fewer companies sitting on piles of cash. I also believe Japan has/had one of the worlds highest saving rates while interest rates there have been zero for decades.