even when Macs did have a market share comparable to PCs, they never seemed to be targeted with the same frequency.
For the most part, I totally agree with you on this post, but the above statement doesn't jibe with my own experience.
I worked in Kinko's Computer Services from 1996 to... oh, I dunno, but like five years off and on. When I started, the Macs were running OS 7.something and the PCs were running Windows for Workgroups 3.11. We had more Macs than PCs, and only had scanners hooked up to Macs. Our customer base was just starting to shift to more PC-oriented, but we still had a very large proportion of customers who were more comfy on the Mac (probably because that was what they used in high school).
And our PCs never seemed to get viruses, while our Macs were constantly being infected. Pretty much every time I ran a good scan on the Macs, they came up with at least one or two bugs, but the PCs were generally clean. When a PC occasionally got exposed to a virus, our antivirus software generally caught it, because it was usually a pretty old one.
So I do remember a time when viruses were more a Mac problem than a PC problem. It's more since Windows 95 + the Internet that it seems the tide has turned on that score.
Gov. is only supposed to do few things according to the Constitution. Provide security for the country, public transportation, and maybe set standards. Not to give money to purposefully "underprivilaged" people.
Er... government is supposed to act on behalf of the majority who elects it. If the government funds underprivileged groups, it's because the people they represent mostly want it that way. I know I do. (And I wish they'd stop doing things like taking education away... that certainly doesn't help our economy, as businesses send higher-skilled jobs to other states and overseas where it's easier to get educated workers.)
My point about getting the $200 back was that, even though we'd been withholding at a *lower* rate than we "should have" been, we still got money back, so obviously they're not taxing us very heavily.
Comcast should have to separate their internet service and their cable. I use directv/tivo so therefore I must pay a penalty extra price for cable internet access. If DSL and phone run over the same line, but are separate features, then cable and internet access over the same cable should be separate features as well. Customers shouldn't pay extra for internet just because they don't want to use one of your other services.
If you pay less to get cable broadband than you do for cable broadband + cable tv, then the services are separate already.
Currently, it is not possible to get DSL service without getting phone service. It *is* possible to get cable broadband without getting cable TV. They charge you an extra premium, but you still pay less than if you got the cable TV service. You can cry that this is unfair, but it's a very different situation than what the article is talking about.
In my last apartment, if I could have gotten DSL for a few bucks more a month without getting the $12 phone line (half of which was fees, taxes, and surcharges on the phone line I wasn't using), I would have been quite happy. But it simply wasn't possible.
"And also I'm not sure what they mean by allowing people to "choose any DSL company they wish". My neighbor has DSL through SpeakEasy and my workplace has it through EarthLink."
You can have SBC phone service and any DSL provider you want. However, if you want SBC DSL service you have to have a SBC phone service as well. You can not have Verizon phone service and SBC DSL, even though you could have SBC phone service and Earthlink DSL service.
You also cannot have DSL service *unless* you have SBC phone service, regardless of who you are buying from (that is, assuming your abode falls within the sphere of influence owned by SBC).
This is the only big complaint I've had about SBC DSL in the six years and four different accounts I've had with them. (Yes, it did take them almost two months to get DSL working for my mom's house, which was built in 1929 and is halfway up a hill too steep for streets... but they kept working on it and eventually found the loading coil or whatever was borking it.)
The only people who call me on it are f*cking telemarketers from SBC trying to sell my their long-distance service, which I also don't need or want.
You can get that stopped: simply call them up, make sure you have *no* long distance service at all, and tell them not to call you anymore. Worked for us. (Also got AT&T to stop calling us to offer us local phone service, when we dropped them as a long distance provider.)
You may like your bundle, but all I want from SBC is DSL for $25/month, without the extra $10 for phone service that I don't use and then additional $10 in taxes and fees that are charged on top of that phone service I don't use.
Are you on flat-rate or measured-rate service? Measured is cheaper... last I knew it was more like $6 and $6 (though that was in 2002). Since you're not using the line, it doesn't matter whether calls are free.
The phone network was not created so you could have the wire connected but no dialtone. So to get DSL the line has to be connected, and hence you have to have at least local phone service.
At least this is how it has been explained to me (by Verizon mind you).
The way it was explained to me (by Covad mind you) was that this is called a "dry pair", and the phone companies don't allow it because then people can buy DSL without buying phone service. (Which is exactly what I wanted to do, and they said they used to do it, but SBC had stopped letting them... this was in about 2001.)
What's so evil about SBC? Should I pay charter cable the same price for half the service (768k down)? It's a free market. I can choose another provider if I want, and I choose not too.
I, too, have had a generally positive experience with SBC DSL (first PacBell DSL, then swallowed by SBC, but without me much noticing), through four different residences.
But this ruling would have helped me a LOT in my last apartment. There, I had great cell reception and all the minutes I could want, so I had no need for a landline. Guess what? I had no way to get DSL *without* getting a landline... and paying $12/month for it ($6 for the lowest-end measured-rate service possible, and another $6 in taxes, surcharges, and fees for the phone line I wasn't using).
Even if I'd gone with an alternate provider, I would have had to get a phone line hooked up and turned on. SBC simply did not allow you to buy *just* DSL... from *anyone*... without buying phone service. As I read the article, that's what this ruling changes.
Do you think the state and local governments should be able to tax my grandmother's house at its appraised value of $200,000 rather than the $12,000 she paid for it forty years ago? Jacking up people's taxes based on a something they have no control over (housing prices) is ridiculous. Even when a corporation buys, say, a $1.5 million building and five years later it's worth $5 million, there's no rational justification for taxing them based on the $5M figure.
But it's perfectly reasonable to say that they should be taxed on the inflation-adjusted value of the property based on the base year. So your $1.5 million property bought in 1999 should be taxed at about $1.7 million in 2004. However, under Prop 13, it can't go up more than 2% per year, so it's taxed at $1.65 million. That's over five years, with very low inflation... people who have owned their houses since 1978 are paying on tiny fractions of the inflation-adjusted assessed values of their properties.
Meanwhile, the government is still subject to paying cost of living increases to gov't employees, and higher prices for materials, and all that other stuff that happens because of normal rates of inflation. While all the time, their revenues from property taxes can be guaranteed to fall relative to costs. Yeah, that makes all *kinds* of sense...
Hey you power companies, you aren't allowed to own power generation anymore!
Um, what?
More like "Please, please, PLEASE can we stop owning our power generation? After all, there's a massive power glut right this minute, and we can make a quick buck if we buy our power elsewhere!" Which they got. They didn't get the right to raise customer's rates however they wanted to, though, since they're still a public utility.
LADWP kept owning their own power generation, investing in modernizing their grid, and providing new green sources of power. As a result, they kept their rates lower than SCE, never had rolling blackouts, and have fewer random power failures (like, almost none... never thought I'd want a UPS at home until I got stuck in SCE territory).
Yes indeed it is one step ahead of every other state when it comes to taxing it's citizens and businesses into oblivion and spending like there's no tomorrow.
Er... yeah, that's probably why, when you take *all* taxes into account, California ranks 10th in amount paid per capita (we rank 4th in amount paid in federal taxes alone). In spite of the fact that we have a much higher average household income and cost of living than most of the country...
Our state taxes are reasonable, our property taxes are nearly nonexistent, and we screamed bloody murder and then axed our governor when he suggested that, since the dot-com bubble burst, we should go back to paying our 2% tax (which was cut to 0.65%) on our cars each year, so that we could afford luxuries like fire and police.
As for spending? The Governator brought in Donna Arduin to uncover all that "waste" and "mismanagement" right? And was going to "throw open the books" (which have been available online for years now already)? And then after looking at things for a few weeks, she said very quietly, "oh, actually, turns out the LAO's office is right... you're just out of money." They couldn't find any waste to cut, so they are borrowing huge amounts of money to keep their promises not to raise taxes.
I don't think I'm being overtaxed when my husband and I got a $205 *refund* even though his state W-4 mistakenly listed 3 exemptions for last year...
OTOH, you probably didn't pay $100-$200 for your landline phone (which is roughly what cell phones cost if you exclude incentives).
No, I didn't pay a cent for my landline phone, it was a christmas gift from my mom. But it retails for $90-160 (I think she paid about $120 for it six months ago).
Ah so if someone trusts what company advertises they must be stupid?
What you're replying to is someone who said that the contract specified that the offer was limited time and could be revoked with one month's notice. The advertisement didn't say otherwise.
Not quite the same as the internet companies who advertise "unlimited" broadband and then, when someone's costing them too much money, start reining them in, without changing their "unlimited" policy.
The cost of SMS messaging is a few cents per message. If prices in NZ are more than this its a regulatory failure.
And, let's see: at $10/month (which I'm assuming is $10 NZD, which is about $6.22 USD) for 500 text messages, that's charging 1.24 US cents per text message. So your point here seems to be that New Zealand charges less for text messaging than we do here in the US, and that the company was entirely fair in pricing $10 NZD for 500 messages?
My landline phone only remembers the last number I dialed. My cell phone remembers the last 10, and has 200 more in the address book. (I can also store numbers on my landline phone, but I can't attach names to them, so I'd have to make a separate record of what number is which person... too much hassle.)
So there's lots of times when it's easier for me to pick up my cell phone to make a call, even when I'm home.
you have unlimited calls to all your friends in your area code,
I live in Los Angeles. About three of my friends are in my area code. The city itself has four different area codes.
Granted, many of those are still not toll charges, but some of them are, and I can't tell by the area code which will be. My friend in Van Nuys (818) is local, but my friend in Reseda (also 818) is a toll call.
and you can sit and chat with them all day like it is nothing if you want, because it isn't going to cost you a dime more or less todo so.
While with my cell phone, I can do the same to my friend in San Jose or my mom when she's out of town in Detroit or Nigeria, and have the same experience... because it's a very, very rare occurence for me to go over my monthly minutes.
With a cellphone, you have all these funky plans, unneeded features, and hidden costs.
My cell phone bill is the same each month, within a few cents. My landline varies more.
I have no "unneeded features." I get a package that includes the features I want and will use. I don't want text messaging, so my package doesn't include it. I do want unlimited long distance, so my package gives me that.
A second landline can be had for $15/mo, so you can have two numbers, one for you, and one for the kids.
I can add a second line to my cell phone for $9.99/month. Oh, and, that $15/month doesn't include about $5/month in taxes, surcharges, and fees you'll be paying. (Same is true of the cell phone, but since many are a percentage of what you pay, it's even cheaper by comparison.)
All for about $35/mo, and you don't have to worry about "going over". If you have family in another state, just get a calling card, or get a good long distance plan.
Or, get a good cell phone plan for about $40/month, and pay nothing extra for long distance or "local toll" at all.
We cancelled long distance service on our landline, because AT&T started charging us $6/month even when we didn't use it. We never use it, because it's free from our cell phones.
So, it sounds like you're woefully underinformed about cellular service, and you're paying for your ignorance. Good on you.
er, if the company isn't making money, how do you expect it to stay in business?
Companies should make money. Sure. But, we seem to think that *any* act on the part of a business is justified if it makes money... which is wrong.
It's kind of like saying "We have the twisted notion that people have the god given right to eat."
The right to eat is not granted in the Constitution or recognized by any government I know of off the top of my head. As a matter of fact, while we do protect many other rights, people are quite free to starve to death, and if they cannot pay for food, they may have no other choice. So, no, people do not have the "right" to eat any more than a company has the "right" to make money. Each has the ability to do these things insofar as they can do so without interfering with the rights of others. A man stealing a loaf of bread to ward off starvation is breaking the law, and will not be granted dispensation because he has a "right" to eat. Why should we have a different rule for corporations?
Show me the reference to the citation of the health code where they had temperatures out of code at that McDonalds. I didn't see one. Is that where your comments in quotes came from? Quotes are usually accompanied by a reference.
Sorry, I figured since about two dozen posts had already cited the text of the case and the decision, it would be modded down as redundant to do so yet again. Look for a moment; you'll find it.
Ignorance of physics aside, show me the person who would be dumb enough to drink coffee that is actually boiling. After all, the consumer is completely blameless in these circumstances, right?
The point is... there must be a threshold temperature after which it is unsafe to serve "hot" coffee. It's ridiculous to claim that because coffee is "hot" that it cannot possibly be served too hot. Handing someone a liquid that can give third degree burns in nothing but a styrofoam cup with a plastic lid seems like a kinda bad idea to me, and not something that is part of my ordinary fast-food-coffee experience. You seem to think there's nothing wrong with it, though... so maybe, karmically, it's more likely to happen to you than to me. I can only hope!
I should know exactly what I will be paying before I make a verbal agreement to have my oil change.
Maybe it's because I live in California, but if I take a car in for an oil change (at an actual garage, and not just to a friend who's a mechanic) I have to sign something that tells me the price and what they're going to do before they start.
My main concern with my cell phone is privacy, so my main concern with this cell phone "bill of rights" is that it says nothing about keeping cell phone numbers private.
That's a separate legislative issue right now. Someone (I forget who) wants to make a directory of cellular numbers, which would then mean paying to stay off of it (like with landline). It's being fought.
I guess my point is that, while this bill of "rights" appears to be nice, I don't see what it should be such a big deal. Most of the topics covered in the bill seem to be topics that a savvy legal mind could take a phone company to court for anyway.
It shouldn't take a savvy legal mind to get a company to adhere to standard good business practices. Maybe the reason why we have something like 3x the number of lawyers per capita of other industrialized nations is because increasingly, you can't go about your daily life without a good training in law. It shouldn't have to be that way, in my opinion.
2. Read the billing information and know the law in your state, even if the state taxes are not seperated from the company "fees" on the bill your 3rd grade math skills can work it out.
Um, no, your 3rd grade math skills are completely useless when it comes to distinguishing company-imposed fees from actual regulatory fees imposed by the PUC et al.
What the regulation means is that this list:
Credits, Adjustments, & Other Charges
Federal Universal Service Fund
Regulatory Cost Recovery Fee Gross Receipts Surcharges to Recover
A Surcharge
B Surcharge
Regulatory Fee Surcharge
Relay Service Device Fund Surcharge
State 911 Tax
Universal Lifeline Surcharge
... Will now have to be split into "Things the government makes YOU pay" and "Things we have to pay for, and want to pass the charge on to you."
Our long-distance bill (for our landline) a couple months ago suddenly started showing up with a new charge on it. We had to call AT&T to find out what it was about, since we never use long distance (it's free on our cell phones, after all;-). I can't remember what the original charge was -- basically, they started charging us a certain amount a month, even if we didn't use the service at all -- but then there was another charge, something like "Invoicing Cost Recovery Fee" that *sounded* governmental, anyway, which it turns out was their fee for sending us a bill. We'd never had to pay this, because they hadn't had to send us a bill before, because they didn't previously charge us for not using their service.
So, it would be nice if *all* service providers had to really clearly make the distinction between government-mandated taxes that are a percentage of your bill (and therefore variable, and can't be rolled into the base cost of service) and fees that the provider adds themselves to cover their costs of doing business (which you'd think they could have built into their plans in the first place, in the interest of honesty).
You should really specify that they can only replicate their *original* DNA... don't grant them the right to unfettered replication of viral DNA, please!
Um, I didn't see anything in this that gets rid of contracts for cellular service. You simply will have 30 days to cancel regardless of the contract, and no matter what the contract says, they have to comply with certain standard business practices regarding billing etc. Where did you get the idea that this somehow gets rid of cellular service contracts?
Why should the government be regulating things other than "right to life" services?
Yeah, good point. I should be able to walk into a 7-11 and steal a candy bar, because that doesn't actually injure anyone...
We have gotten this twisted notion in the US that companies have a god-given right to make money, and consumers have a responsibility to pay for it (though they don't seem to have the same responsibility to pay taxes for government services, under the same logic). This is simply not the case. Governments have the same right to regulate deceptive business practices just as much as they can regulate individuals who scam, swindle, and cheat.
What they've found is that often, until people have been through a billing cycle, they don't fully know how their cellular service is going to work. So you get 30 days to cancel penalty-free. Almost *any* product can be returned; why should cellular service be different? In fact, when companies have more restrictive return policies, they often have you initial them when you make your purchase, just to make *sure* you understand (I've had this experience recently with maternity clothes... seems a lot of women will wear them for a few months and then try to return them after the pregnancy, so they have strict time limits on returns). Therefore, the accepted norm is to be able to return products you're unsatisfied with, and there's no compelling reason that cellular should be an exception.
How can this "bill" be modified to both give consumers the obvious rights they should have while allowing the cell phone companies to offer subsidized phone deals?
The same way you do with any other return. If you return the service and the phone, but the phone is not in a resaleable condition, you'll be required to pay for it. If I cancel my cable service, and the box is trashed when I return it, they charge me for it. I would expect a cellular company to do the same thing.
If the phone is returned in perfect condition with all the original packaging, they should be able to re-sell it. If not, they should be able to ship it back to the company for minimal cost to be vetted and repackaged, so it can be sold as new or at least refurbished. Tons and tons of industries manage to handle returns of merchandise; this shouldn't be any different.
The value and cost of cell is dropping. The prices are not.
I disagree. Every year to 18 months, I wander into my local Cingular Authorized Reseller, get a new phone for free, and a lower-priced package that includes more bells and whistles. I have to sign up for a two-year contract for that, but I've actually reduced my contract to a lower service just a few months after signing a new one with *no penalty*. As long as I don't up and quit, the contract doesn't seem to matter.
Next time I do this, I'll be paying the same monthly rate for the same number of minutes, but they'll roll over from month to month. When my husband's phone moves over to Cingular (probably we'll wait until the AT&T buyout does this for us, since he's on AT&TW right now), we can sign up for FamilyTalk and pay even less for the same service.
Maybe this is why California can make these laws... cellular competition *is* already pretty fierce, and everyone wants a piece of the pie. So we can say "ok, but you gotta play by the rules" and grumble as they might, they will play.
Frankly, of the major carriers available in California, the only ones I expect to be significantly affected by these rules are Sprint and Nextel. I've never heard any billing boondoggles with Cingular, Verizon, T-Mobile, or AT&T Wireless. We'll see who squawks loudest...
Slashdot Mirror
even when Macs did have a market share comparable to PCs, they never seemed to be targeted with the same frequency.
For the most part, I totally agree with you on this post, but the above statement doesn't jibe with my own experience.
I worked in Kinko's Computer Services from 1996 to... oh, I dunno, but like five years off and on. When I started, the Macs were running OS 7.something and the PCs were running Windows for Workgroups 3.11. We had more Macs than PCs, and only had scanners hooked up to Macs. Our customer base was just starting to shift to more PC-oriented, but we still had a very large proportion of customers who were more comfy on the Mac (probably because that was what they used in high school).
And our PCs never seemed to get viruses, while our Macs were constantly being infected. Pretty much every time I ran a good scan on the Macs, they came up with at least one or two bugs, but the PCs were generally clean. When a PC occasionally got exposed to a virus, our antivirus software generally caught it, because it was usually a pretty old one.
So I do remember a time when viruses were more a Mac problem than a PC problem. It's more since Windows 95 + the Internet that it seems the tide has turned on that score.
Your signature is interesting, being that people making 75 to 100k a year are technically well into the top 25% of income earners. Go figure.
Yeah, that's the point exactly. See my Journal for more info.
Gov. is only supposed to do few things according to the Constitution. Provide security for the country, public transportation, and maybe set standards. Not to give money to purposefully "underprivilaged" people.
Er... government is supposed to act on behalf of the majority who elects it. If the government funds underprivileged groups, it's because the people they represent mostly want it that way. I know I do. (And I wish they'd stop doing things like taking education away... that certainly doesn't help our economy, as businesses send higher-skilled jobs to other states and overseas where it's easier to get educated workers.)
My point about getting the $200 back was that, even though we'd been withholding at a *lower* rate than we "should have" been, we still got money back, so obviously they're not taxing us very heavily.
Try a Google News Search:
San Jose Mercury News (from AP)
Los Angeles Times
And many others... looks legit to me.
Comcast should have to separate their internet service and their cable. I use directv/tivo so therefore I must pay a penalty extra price for cable internet access. If DSL and phone run over the same line, but are separate features, then cable and internet access over the same cable should be separate features as well. Customers shouldn't pay extra for internet just because they don't want to use one of your other services.
If you pay less to get cable broadband than you do for cable broadband + cable tv, then the services are separate already.
Currently, it is not possible to get DSL service without getting phone service. It *is* possible to get cable broadband without getting cable TV. They charge you an extra premium, but you still pay less than if you got the cable TV service. You can cry that this is unfair, but it's a very different situation than what the article is talking about.
In my last apartment, if I could have gotten DSL for a few bucks more a month without getting the $12 phone line (half of which was fees, taxes, and surcharges on the phone line I wasn't using), I would have been quite happy. But it simply wasn't possible.
You also cannot have DSL service *unless* you have SBC phone service, regardless of who you are buying from (that is, assuming your abode falls within the sphere of influence owned by SBC).
This is the only big complaint I've had about SBC DSL in the six years and four different accounts I've had with them. (Yes, it did take them almost two months to get DSL working for my mom's house, which was built in 1929 and is halfway up a hill too steep for streets... but they kept working on it and eventually found the loading coil or whatever was borking it.)
The only people who call me on it are f*cking telemarketers from SBC trying to sell my their long-distance service, which I also don't need or want.
You can get that stopped: simply call them up, make sure you have *no* long distance service at all, and tell them not to call you anymore. Worked for us. (Also got AT&T to stop calling us to offer us local phone service, when we dropped them as a long distance provider.)
You may like your bundle, but all I want from SBC is DSL for $25/month, without the extra $10 for phone service that I don't use and then additional $10 in taxes and fees that are charged on top of that phone service I don't use.
Are you on flat-rate or measured-rate service? Measured is cheaper... last I knew it was more like $6 and $6 (though that was in 2002). Since you're not using the line, it doesn't matter whether calls are free.
The phone network was not created so you could have the wire connected but no dialtone. So to get DSL the line has to be connected, and hence you have to have at least local phone service.
At least this is how it has been explained to me (by Verizon mind you).
The way it was explained to me (by Covad mind you) was that this is called a "dry pair", and the phone companies don't allow it because then people can buy DSL without buying phone service. (Which is exactly what I wanted to do, and they said they used to do it, but SBC had stopped letting them... this was in about 2001.)
What's so evil about SBC? Should I pay charter cable the same price for half the service (768k down)? It's a free market. I can choose another provider if I want, and I choose not too.
I, too, have had a generally positive experience with SBC DSL (first PacBell DSL, then swallowed by SBC, but without me much noticing), through four different residences.
But this ruling would have helped me a LOT in my last apartment. There, I had great cell reception and all the minutes I could want, so I had no need for a landline. Guess what? I had no way to get DSL *without* getting a landline... and paying $12/month for it ($6 for the lowest-end measured-rate service possible, and another $6 in taxes, surcharges, and fees for the phone line I wasn't using).
Even if I'd gone with an alternate provider, I would have had to get a phone line hooked up and turned on. SBC simply did not allow you to buy *just* DSL... from *anyone*... without buying phone service. As I read the article, that's what this ruling changes.
Do you think the state and local governments should be able to tax my grandmother's house at its appraised value of $200,000 rather than the $12,000 she paid for it forty years ago? Jacking up people's taxes based on a something they have no control over (housing prices) is ridiculous. Even when a corporation buys, say, a $1.5 million building and five years later it's worth $5 million, there's no rational justification for taxing them based on the $5M figure.
But it's perfectly reasonable to say that they should be taxed on the inflation-adjusted value of the property based on the base year. So your $1.5 million property bought in 1999 should be taxed at about $1.7 million in 2004. However, under Prop 13, it can't go up more than 2% per year, so it's taxed at $1.65 million. That's over five years, with very low inflation... people who have owned their houses since 1978 are paying on tiny fractions of the inflation-adjusted assessed values of their properties.
Meanwhile, the government is still subject to paying cost of living increases to gov't employees, and higher prices for materials, and all that other stuff that happens because of normal rates of inflation. While all the time, their revenues from property taxes can be guaranteed to fall relative to costs. Yeah, that makes all *kinds* of sense...
Hey you power companies, you aren't allowed to own power generation anymore!
Um, what?
More like "Please, please, PLEASE can we stop owning our power generation? After all, there's a massive power glut right this minute, and we can make a quick buck if we buy our power elsewhere!" Which they got. They didn't get the right to raise customer's rates however they wanted to, though, since they're still a public utility.
LADWP kept owning their own power generation, investing in modernizing their grid, and providing new green sources of power. As a result, they kept their rates lower than SCE, never had rolling blackouts, and have fewer random power failures (like, almost none... never thought I'd want a UPS at home until I got stuck in SCE territory).
Yes indeed it is one step ahead of every other state when it comes to taxing it's citizens and businesses into oblivion and spending like there's no tomorrow.
Er... yeah, that's probably why, when you take *all* taxes into account, California ranks 10th in amount paid per capita (we rank 4th in amount paid in federal taxes alone). In spite of the fact that we have a much higher average household income and cost of living than most of the country...
Our state taxes are reasonable, our property taxes are nearly nonexistent, and we screamed bloody murder and then axed our governor when he suggested that, since the dot-com bubble burst, we should go back to paying our 2% tax (which was cut to 0.65%) on our cars each year, so that we could afford luxuries like fire and police.
As for spending? The Governator brought in Donna Arduin to uncover all that "waste" and "mismanagement" right? And was going to "throw open the books" (which have been available online for years now already)? And then after looking at things for a few weeks, she said very quietly, "oh, actually, turns out the LAO's office is right... you're just out of money." They couldn't find any waste to cut, so they are borrowing huge amounts of money to keep their promises not to raise taxes.
I don't think I'm being overtaxed when my husband and I got a $205 *refund* even though his state W-4 mistakenly listed 3 exemptions for last year...
OTOH, you probably didn't pay $100-$200 for your landline phone (which is roughly what cell phones cost if you exclude incentives).
No, I didn't pay a cent for my landline phone, it was a christmas gift from my mom. But it retails for $90-160 (I think she paid about $120 for it six months ago).
"too stupid"
Ah so if someone trusts what company advertises they must be stupid?
What you're replying to is someone who said that the contract specified that the offer was limited time and could be revoked with one month's notice. The advertisement didn't say otherwise.
Not quite the same as the internet companies who advertise "unlimited" broadband and then, when someone's costing them too much money, start reining them in, without changing their "unlimited" policy.
The cost of SMS messaging is a few cents per message. If prices in NZ are more than this its a regulatory failure.
And, let's see: at $10/month (which I'm assuming is $10 NZD, which is about $6.22 USD) for 500 text messages, that's charging 1.24 US cents per text message. So your point here seems to be that New Zealand charges less for text messaging than we do here in the US, and that the company was entirely fair in pricing $10 NZD for 500 messages?
Land lines are so much easier,
My landline phone only remembers the last number I dialed. My cell phone remembers the last 10, and has 200 more in the address book. (I can also store numbers on my landline phone, but I can't attach names to them, so I'd have to make a separate record of what number is which person... too much hassle.)
So there's lots of times when it's easier for me to pick up my cell phone to make a call, even when I'm home.
you have unlimited calls to all your friends in your area code,
I live in Los Angeles. About three of my friends are in my area code. The city itself has four different area codes.
Granted, many of those are still not toll charges, but some of them are, and I can't tell by the area code which will be. My friend in Van Nuys (818) is local, but my friend in Reseda (also 818) is a toll call.
and you can sit and chat with them all day like it is nothing if you want, because it isn't going to cost you a dime more or less todo so.
While with my cell phone, I can do the same to my friend in San Jose or my mom when she's out of town in Detroit or Nigeria, and have the same experience... because it's a very, very rare occurence for me to go over my monthly minutes.
With a cellphone, you have all these funky plans, unneeded features, and hidden costs.
My cell phone bill is the same each month, within a few cents. My landline varies more.
I have no "unneeded features." I get a package that includes the features I want and will use. I don't want text messaging, so my package doesn't include it. I do want unlimited long distance, so my package gives me that.
A second landline can be had for $15/mo, so you can have two numbers, one for you, and one for the kids.
I can add a second line to my cell phone for $9.99/month. Oh, and, that $15/month doesn't include about $5/month in taxes, surcharges, and fees you'll be paying. (Same is true of the cell phone, but since many are a percentage of what you pay, it's even cheaper by comparison.)
All for about $35/mo, and you don't have to worry about "going over". If you have family in another state, just get a calling card, or get a good long distance plan.
Or, get a good cell phone plan for about $40/month, and pay nothing extra for long distance or "local toll" at all.
We cancelled long distance service on our landline, because AT&T started charging us $6/month even when we didn't use it. We never use it, because it's free from our cell phones.
So, it sounds like you're woefully underinformed about cellular service, and you're paying for your ignorance. Good on you.
er, if the company isn't making money, how do you expect it to stay in business?
Companies should make money. Sure. But, we seem to think that *any* act on the part of a business is justified if it makes money... which is wrong.
It's kind of like saying "We have the twisted notion that people have the god given right to eat."
The right to eat is not granted in the Constitution or recognized by any government I know of off the top of my head. As a matter of fact, while we do protect many other rights, people are quite free to starve to death, and if they cannot pay for food, they may have no other choice. So, no, people do not have the "right" to eat any more than a company has the "right" to make money. Each has the ability to do these things insofar as they can do so without interfering with the rights of others. A man stealing a loaf of bread to ward off starvation is breaking the law, and will not be granted dispensation because he has a "right" to eat. Why should we have a different rule for corporations?
Show me the reference to the citation of the health code where they had temperatures out of code at that McDonalds. I didn't see one. Is that where your comments in quotes came from? Quotes are usually accompanied by a reference.
Sorry, I figured since about two dozen posts had already cited the text of the case and the decision, it would be modded down as redundant to do so yet again. Look for a moment; you'll find it.
Ignorance of physics aside, show me the person who would be dumb enough to drink coffee that is actually boiling. After all, the consumer is completely blameless in these circumstances, right?
The point is... there must be a threshold temperature after which it is unsafe to serve "hot" coffee. It's ridiculous to claim that because coffee is "hot" that it cannot possibly be served too hot. Handing someone a liquid that can give third degree burns in nothing but a styrofoam cup with a plastic lid seems like a kinda bad idea to me, and not something that is part of my ordinary fast-food-coffee experience. You seem to think there's nothing wrong with it, though... so maybe, karmically, it's more likely to happen to you than to me. I can only hope!
I should know exactly what I will be paying before I make a verbal agreement to have my oil change.
Maybe it's because I live in California, but if I take a car in for an oil change (at an actual garage, and not just to a friend who's a mechanic) I have to sign something that tells me the price and what they're going to do before they start.
My main concern with my cell phone is privacy, so my main concern with this cell phone "bill of rights" is that it says nothing about keeping cell phone numbers private.
That's a separate legislative issue right now. Someone (I forget who) wants to make a directory of cellular numbers, which would then mean paying to stay off of it (like with landline). It's being fought.
I guess my point is that, while this bill of "rights" appears to be nice, I don't see what it should be such a big deal. Most of the topics covered in the bill seem to be topics that a savvy legal mind could take a phone company to court for anyway.
It shouldn't take a savvy legal mind to get a company to adhere to standard good business practices. Maybe the reason why we have something like 3x the number of lawyers per capita of other industrialized nations is because increasingly, you can't go about your daily life without a good training in law. It shouldn't have to be that way, in my opinion.
2. Read the billing information and know the law in your state, even if the state taxes are not seperated from the company "fees" on the bill your 3rd grade math skills can work it out.
... Will now have to be split into "Things the government makes YOU pay" and "Things we have to pay for, and want to pass the charge on to you."
;-). I can't remember what the original charge was -- basically, they started charging us a certain amount a month, even if we didn't use the service at all -- but then there was another charge, something like "Invoicing Cost Recovery Fee" that *sounded* governmental, anyway, which it turns out was their fee for sending us a bill. We'd never had to pay this, because they hadn't had to send us a bill before, because they didn't previously charge us for not using their service.
Um, no, your 3rd grade math skills are completely useless when it comes to distinguishing company-imposed fees from actual regulatory fees imposed by the PUC et al.
What the regulation means is that this list:
Credits, Adjustments, & Other Charges
Federal Universal Service Fund
Regulatory Cost Recovery Fee
Gross Receipts Surcharges to Recover
A Surcharge
B Surcharge
Regulatory Fee Surcharge
Relay Service Device Fund Surcharge
State 911 Tax
Universal Lifeline Surcharge
Our long-distance bill (for our landline) a couple months ago suddenly started showing up with a new charge on it. We had to call AT&T to find out what it was about, since we never use long distance (it's free on our cell phones, after all
So, it would be nice if *all* service providers had to really clearly make the distinction between government-mandated taxes that are a percentage of your bill (and therefore variable, and can't be rolled into the base cost of service) and fees that the provider adds themselves to cover their costs of doing business (which you'd think they could have built into their plans in the first place, in the interest of honesty).
2) The right to unfettered DNA replication.
You should really specify that they can only replicate their *original* DNA... don't grant them the right to unfettered replication of viral DNA, please!
Um, I didn't see anything in this that gets rid of contracts for cellular service. You simply will have 30 days to cancel regardless of the contract, and no matter what the contract says, they have to comply with certain standard business practices regarding billing etc. Where did you get the idea that this somehow gets rid of cellular service contracts?
Why should the government be regulating things other than "right to life" services?
Yeah, good point. I should be able to walk into a 7-11 and steal a candy bar, because that doesn't actually injure anyone...
We have gotten this twisted notion in the US that companies have a god-given right to make money, and consumers have a responsibility to pay for it (though they don't seem to have the same responsibility to pay taxes for government services, under the same logic). This is simply not the case. Governments have the same right to regulate deceptive business practices just as much as they can regulate individuals who scam, swindle, and cheat.
What they've found is that often, until people have been through a billing cycle, they don't fully know how their cellular service is going to work. So you get 30 days to cancel penalty-free. Almost *any* product can be returned; why should cellular service be different? In fact, when companies have more restrictive return policies, they often have you initial them when you make your purchase, just to make *sure* you understand (I've had this experience recently with maternity clothes... seems a lot of women will wear them for a few months and then try to return them after the pregnancy, so they have strict time limits on returns). Therefore, the accepted norm is to be able to return products you're unsatisfied with, and there's no compelling reason that cellular should be an exception.
How can this "bill" be modified to both give consumers the obvious rights they should have while allowing the cell phone companies to offer subsidized phone deals?
The same way you do with any other return. If you return the service and the phone, but the phone is not in a resaleable condition, you'll be required to pay for it. If I cancel my cable service, and the box is trashed when I return it, they charge me for it. I would expect a cellular company to do the same thing.
If the phone is returned in perfect condition with all the original packaging, they should be able to re-sell it. If not, they should be able to ship it back to the company for minimal cost to be vetted and repackaged, so it can be sold as new or at least refurbished. Tons and tons of industries manage to handle returns of merchandise; this shouldn't be any different.
The value and cost of cell is dropping. The prices are not.
I disagree. Every year to 18 months, I wander into my local Cingular Authorized Reseller, get a new phone for free, and a lower-priced package that includes more bells and whistles. I have to sign up for a two-year contract for that, but I've actually reduced my contract to a lower service just a few months after signing a new one with *no penalty*. As long as I don't up and quit, the contract doesn't seem to matter.
Next time I do this, I'll be paying the same monthly rate for the same number of minutes, but they'll roll over from month to month. When my husband's phone moves over to Cingular (probably we'll wait until the AT&T buyout does this for us, since he's on AT&TW right now), we can sign up for FamilyTalk and pay even less for the same service.
Maybe this is why California can make these laws... cellular competition *is* already pretty fierce, and everyone wants a piece of the pie. So we can say "ok, but you gotta play by the rules" and grumble as they might, they will play.
Frankly, of the major carriers available in California, the only ones I expect to be significantly affected by these rules are Sprint and Nextel. I've never heard any billing boondoggles with Cingular, Verizon, T-Mobile, or AT&T Wireless. We'll see who squawks loudest...