Those of the older generation are likely somewhat short. I wonder how many of those that said "No" traded tapes or sneakernetted when they were younger and such.
I've noticed this myself. My father was a professional musician for a lot of years, and by virtue of the fact that he made his living playing music he obviously feels very strongly about music piracy. Many a night have I listened to him and his friends from the industry rail against the pirates "stealing from artists."
But, even back in the days before the internet, I remember watching movies he had taped off of television, in some cases over a decade earlier. He had countless cassette tapes he had recorded off the radio or copied from LPs and later CDs, concerts he had recorded...he even had stuff he had copied onto reel-to-reel; it was so old it predated the cassette. Pointing this out to him when he gets on his rants about piracy yields little, as he seems to think it's different somehow. The fact that, in his youth, he was the dirty pirate just doesn't compute.
It's funny to me how, to people like my father, the justification for piracy has more to do with how difficult it is to do, or the quality of the copy, and not the act of pirating in itself, like it's okay as long as the copy is shitty and making it is time consuming. It wasn't until the internet came around and people started downloading that he really started having a problem with it, which is a little ridiculous to me, and a little hypocritical as well, but seems to be a mindset shared by many of his peers.
My cat would run in mortal terror from that thing. Hell, I would run in mortal terror from that thing if it was scaled up to my size and coming at me like that....
Meanwhile, SOPA will speed it's way through congress with all it's job killing regulations intact, because job killing regulations don't apply to the internet apparently...
Your ignoring the fact that locking the phones in directly prevents competition. Once the people are free to buy a phone through one carrier and switch any time they want to another, assuming there won't be massive collusion between the carriers, they are going to be competing to get people onto their service. This competition will drive prices down. Even if hardware is sold at retail, the cheaper rates through the carriers will offset that because it will be trivial to move to a competitor. Either way it's win-win for the consumers.
Personally, I have no problem paying retail price for a phone if it means I can get service through whoever I want.
Even a virtual currency would be a better gauge then the current retarded "poll" method. Thanks to Frank Luntz (and people like him), you can't really trust any fucking poll out there. Something that gives everyone, say, $100 virtual dollars to distribute among the various candidates throughout the entire campaign period would be a good tool to see who truly has the support of...well, anyone in the 'has a smartphone' demographic, anyway.
Although honestly, it really doesn't seem like ours is a demographic they much give a shit about, based on how often they fuck about with the things we care about, i.e., SOPA.
I'm still waiting to hear why things like Minimum Wage and EPA regulations are "job killers" while things like SOPA aren't...
The companies that are going to be most effected by this stupid bullshit are the few American companies that are actually doing well right now. I thought we had to make America "open for business"? Are these not businesses as well, or do they not donate enough to qualify for that kind of consideration?
It's just so retarded on so many levels. The web brings in 100 times more revenue than the MAFIAA does. Why are we going to cripple it? It makes no sense whatsoever...
That's my thinking as well. We keep hearing how "regulation forces business overseas" from the same people that are championing this ridiculous crap.
How is this not "job killing regulation"??? Why are all these Reps not screaming their bloody heads off about this like they do about EPA standards or Minimum Wage or any of the other things they rail against? It's completely retarded and ass-backwards; they want to make it easy for all the manufacturing to come home while at the same time forcing every web-based company overseas. How the fuck does that benefit us at all, especially when those tech jobs are generally better paying and thus better stimulate the economy?
The companies that stand to lose the most with this shit are among some of the few American companies actually doing well at this point. This entire situation is total fucking lunacy...
Plus, some of the complaints are bullshit; for instance, the whole "serving information directly" thing, i.e., the way typing in a company's NYSE abbreviation brings up the little Google Finance thing with the current stock price and recent trends instead of giving results to a bunch of financial firms and shit. For the vast majority of users, they don't want to go digging around for a fucking answer to a simple question, they just want the answer. Typing "2 + 2" does not mean "give me links to online calculators."
The only companies complaining about shit like that are companies that are trying to monetize public information, which is bullshit anyway. Forcing information to be obfuscated so as to force people to dig around on random third party sites seems like a step completely in the wrong direction in terms of progress.
Rather than trading one set of people buying off our government for another set, how about these tech companies band together and help force a real dialog on campaign reform? If they truly care about freedom and rights, they should be advocating for causes beyond those which directly effect their own bottom line.
All I'm saying is, if corporations are people, they're some pretty goddamned selfish people. Is there any corporation out there that could be called "altruistic"? I've never heard of one. What board would even tolerate altruism if it didn't line their own pockets? Even humanitarian efforts and charitable giving is often for tax purposes or so they can throw commercials on TV showing everybody how great they are, i.e., advertising.
I laud the efforts of these tech companies, but I would respect it a lot more if they were standing up as citizens of this country, not as people that stand to lose money financially due to this legislation.
They should start by targeting the entire U.S. and other "pro-SOPA" countries and leave the other countries alone. Why punish people all over the world just because a small minority of people in the U.S. are corrupt douchebag cockheads?
Targeting only D.C. isn't going to do much...the vast majority of the people, particularly legislators, that are supporting this legislation hardly even use the web.
Although this can backfire, as certain people (my brother, for instance), when he spies one of those "my car is so amazing I'm going to park across 3 spaces in the back of the lot" situations makes it a point to properly park in a space directly next to said car regardless of how many spaces there are closer.
Some people may consider it a dick move, but based on the nasty comments that he's gotten from those people the few times I was present and there was actually a confrontation about it, I'd say it's a dick move against a dickhead that thinks he's special, so it's hard to feel too bad about it. It's also funny how many people feel they are entitled to a 50 foot buffer around their car just because it cost more money than others.
Yeah, my experiences with Charter have been about the same over the last 10 years I've been a customer of theirs. The only time I ever had a tech that seemed like he knew anything (and didn't just try to bullshit me) was recently, and even then it took a problem being escalated to the supervisor's supervisor to get that kind of attention. Turns out the "shitty wiring in the walls that was preventing [me] from getting more than 4 meg that would never be repaired unless the landlord tore all the walls out and rewired the building" was actually a faulty node that was blasting everyone in this complex with so much noise on the lines that anything beyond regular web surfing didn't work for shit (and even that worked like crap during peak, which was always the excuse, "it's peak usage, sorry, nothing can be done". It took a year of complaints from everyone in this complex until they finally investigated and found the problem with the node and, when they replaced/repaired it, holy shit, everything started working again. Imagine that...
If there was any other alternative that offered similar speeds, I would switch, but unfortunately my choice is them or DSL that tops out at 7 meg for the same price. Either way, their Level 3 guy openly admitted that most of the lower level techs know enough to plug the shit in and do basic troubleshooting, but that's about it. However, he did say that 99% of the time the problem is user error related to people not knowing how to plug the shit in or connect to the network, so maybe that's why? Either way, though, I could do without the bullshit answers. I've had the problems blamed on my router more often than I can count (even though that's complete bullshit), and funny, that always segues into trying to get me to rent one from them for $7 a month. Uh, yeah, no thanks...
They didn't say they changed their minds at all, they said "GoDaddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it." Notice they didn't say "SOPA is wrong" or "SOPA will break the internet" or anything negative about SOPA at all, they just withdrew their support based on the community at large moving their domains at a lightning rate.
The fact that they didn't see this coming is mind boggling to me. The vast majority of their customer base stands to lose the few rights they have left as conferred by the DMCA and it's "Safe Harbor" provisions. It'd be like 7-11 supporting laws designed to make tobacco products illegal, or McDonalds supporting laws that would limit how much fast food people are allowed to consume. Why would they actively try to piss off a huge segment of their customer base? Dumbasses...
Debt collectors are already doing shit like this now. There have been a few big ones busted in New York state that I remember reading about. Half the time the firm attempting to collect the debt can't produce proof that they even own the rights to collect it.
So yeah, once we "get government out of the way" and allow these companies to legally use methods like this, I'm sure it won't be long before every major company has their own tracksuit-wearing 'Persuasion Specialists' wielding baseball bats and broken hockey sticks...
The idea of credit is bullshit to most Chinese people I know and they think it is crazy to rack up debt like that. It's a cultural thing. Why does VISA get 3% of my revenue (not profit) just for being there? Fuck that shit. Cash mother fuckers. Cash. I am paraphrasing a friend who owns a tea shop.
Cash is also great when you're trying to hide income from the IRS. Not saying that your friends are trying to cheat the government, but it's certainly much easier when there is no paper trail. A family acquaintance owns a few laundromats and has openly bragged to us about how easy it is to funnel money out of there without anyone knowing anything because it's completely cash-based.
Maybe they're bullshitting, maybe not...just repeating what I was told.
The pertinent portion of law that applies to your question is the Coinage Act of 1965, specifically Section 31 U.S.C. 5103, entitled "Legal tender," which states: "United States coins and currency (including Federal reserve notes and circulating notes of Federal reserve banks and national banks) are legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues."
This statute means that all United States money as identified above are a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor. There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether or not to accept cash unless there is a State law which says otherwise. For example, a bus line may prohibit payment of fares in pennies or dollar bills. In addition, movie theaters, convenience stores and gas stations may refuse to accept large denomination currency (usually notes above $20) as a matter of policy. Source
Granted, Verizon probably has negotiated a better rate, but each transaction is probably costing not much less than $2.
According to their 2010 Q4 report (the first one I found, there may be a more recent one but it doesn't really matter) they have 102.2 million connections to 94.1 million total customers. If just half their customers pay their bill online (probably much higher percentage, but for the sake of argument) that's 47.05 million card not present transactions being run. Assuming that the average bill is just $50 (probably a low estimate, but again, sake of argument) you're looking at $10.351 million just to cover the initial.22 cent fee. Add the 2% transaction value to that $50 charge and you're looking at $1.22 per payment, or $57.401 million a month, or $688,812,000 a year.
I just can't believe that they would pay that just to take customer payments, even a company as large as Verizon, and even if they were, I can't believe that they wouldn't have inserted mechanisms to pass this fee along to consumers long before now.
Obviously I have no proof (I would be highly interested to hear what they really pay, as would many people I'm sure) but I just can't believe that this isn't opportunism being masqueraded about as necessity. I have seen nothing out of Verizon or any other company to lead me to believe that they would ever resist the urge to make a quick buck at customer expense, especially tens of millions of customers, the vast majority of which are locked into a contract with stiff penalties for early termination.
If someone from within Verizon can show me something that refutes my opinion, I will happily modify it. Like I said, I am really curious how much of these "costs" originate directly from external causes. We've been hearing a lot of the "don't blame $CORPORATION, blame regulations/fees/D.C.!!" meme over the last year or so every time they find a new way to increase their revenues and it's getting a little old at this point. Just my personal feelings on the issue...
As for the "imposing new fees on existing customers" thing, that's easy (emphasis mine):
You agree to pay all access, usage and other charges that you or the user of your wireless device incurred. For Postpay Service, our charges also include Federal Universal Service, Regulatory and Administrative Charges, and we may also include other charges related to our governmental costs. We set these charges; they aren't taxes, they aren't required by law, they are not necessarily related to anything the government does, they are kept by us in whole or in part, and the amounts and what they pay for may change.Source
As for the pennies (again, emphasis mine):
The pertinent portion of law that applies to your question is the Coinage Act of 1965, specifically Section 31 U.S.C. 5103, entitled "Legal tender," which states: "United States coins and currency (including Federal reserve notes and circulating notes of Federal reserve banks and national banks) are legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues."
This statute means that all United States money as identified above are a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor. There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether or not to accept cash unless there is a State law which says otherwise. For example, a bus line may prohibit payment of fares in pennies or dollar bills. In addition, movie theaters, convenience stores and gas stations may refuse to accept large denomination currency (usually notes above $20) as a matter of policy.
No private entity has to accept any currency they do not wish to, and that is solely at the discretion of said business, unless the law states otherwise. I believe some states have laws dealing with this on the books, but Federally speaking, you can accept or not accept whatever you want.
That simply means that it is legal currency, which has nothing whatsoever to do with whether you have to accept it. Like I said, the same mechanisms that allow a vendor to not accept large amounts of change are what allows businesses not to take large bills, and pretty much every gas station and convenience store does so. It is also what allows a business not to take a bill that is in poor shape. For instance, I once had someone attempt to pay me in money that, no shit, had blood on it. A couple times it smelled like it had urine or feces on it. For a less extreme example, there were more occasions when someone wanted to pay me with money out of their bra or waistband, completely soaked with sweat to the point where the bills stuck to their hands as they tried to count it out. Needless to say, I would not accept those bills, and yeah, the customers were pissed off, but in the end, they either got a method of payment that wasn't a biohazard or they abandoned the sale.
There is no law that says that a vendor has to accept your method of payment, even cash. There are many businesses that don't even keep cash on hand. For instance, car dealerships. If you show up with a bag full of money wanting to buy a car, there's no legal obligation that they have to sell you one. If you show up at the dealership to pay your car payment with a bag full of pennies, likewise, they're under no obligation to take them. The fact that it is payment of a debt or to purchase something is immaterial.
Now, the government, yeah, I believe they have to accept cash, but I don't even think they are necessarily required to accept bulk change payments on the spot, i.e., some pissed off person showing up to the treasurers office with a wheelbarrow full of pennies. Back in June, a guy showed up to his local offices with 2,500 pennies, dumped them on the counter, and ended up with a citation for disorderly conduct for his troubles.
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Those of the older generation are likely somewhat short. I wonder how many of those that said "No" traded tapes or sneakernetted when they were younger and such.
I've noticed this myself. My father was a professional musician for a lot of years, and by virtue of the fact that he made his living playing music he obviously feels very strongly about music piracy. Many a night have I listened to him and his friends from the industry rail against the pirates "stealing from artists."
But, even back in the days before the internet, I remember watching movies he had taped off of television, in some cases over a decade earlier. He had countless cassette tapes he had recorded off the radio or copied from LPs and later CDs, concerts he had recorded...he even had stuff he had copied onto reel-to-reel; it was so old it predated the cassette. Pointing this out to him when he gets on his rants about piracy yields little, as he seems to think it's different somehow. The fact that, in his youth, he was the dirty pirate just doesn't compute.
It's funny to me how, to people like my father, the justification for piracy has more to do with how difficult it is to do, or the quality of the copy, and not the act of pirating in itself, like it's okay as long as the copy is shitty and making it is time consuming. It wasn't until the internet came around and people started downloading that he really started having a problem with it, which is a little ridiculous to me, and a little hypocritical as well, but seems to be a mindset shared by many of his peers.
My cat would run in mortal terror from that thing. Hell, I would run in mortal terror from that thing if it was scaled up to my size and coming at me like that....
Specifically, I.E. 6 users, because fuck them.
Meanwhile, SOPA will speed it's way through congress with all it's job killing regulations intact, because job killing regulations don't apply to the internet apparently...
Your ignoring the fact that locking the phones in directly prevents competition. Once the people are free to buy a phone through one carrier and switch any time they want to another, assuming there won't be massive collusion between the carriers, they are going to be competing to get people onto their service. This competition will drive prices down. Even if hardware is sold at retail, the cheaper rates through the carriers will offset that because it will be trivial to move to a competitor. Either way it's win-win for the consumers.
Personally, I have no problem paying retail price for a phone if it means I can get service through whoever I want.
Even a virtual currency would be a better gauge then the current retarded "poll" method. Thanks to Frank Luntz (and people like him), you can't really trust any fucking poll out there. Something that gives everyone, say, $100 virtual dollars to distribute among the various candidates throughout the entire campaign period would be a good tool to see who truly has the support of...well, anyone in the 'has a smartphone' demographic, anyway.
Although honestly, it really doesn't seem like ours is a demographic they much give a shit about, based on how often they fuck about with the things we care about, i.e., SOPA.
I would honestly be impressed if one of the candidates really did have a rooted ICS superphone...
I wouldn't vote for them because of that, obviously, but it would blow my fucking mind. Most of them still think the internet is not a big truck...
Reminds me of the "I can see Russia from my house!!" ring tone I had set for my mother (who lives in Fairbanks) back in 2008.
Really? I would...
The whole "being a fucking bigot" thing is a huge turnoff for me...
I'm still waiting to hear why things like Minimum Wage and EPA regulations are "job killers" while things like SOPA aren't...
The companies that are going to be most effected by this stupid bullshit are the few American companies that are actually doing well right now. I thought we had to make America "open for business"? Are these not businesses as well, or do they not donate enough to qualify for that kind of consideration?
It's just so retarded on so many levels. The web brings in 100 times more revenue than the MAFIAA does. Why are we going to cripple it? It makes no sense whatsoever...
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that would be illegal. Funny as fuck, but illegal.
That's my thinking as well. We keep hearing how "regulation forces business overseas" from the same people that are championing this ridiculous crap.
How is this not "job killing regulation"??? Why are all these Reps not screaming their bloody heads off about this like they do about EPA standards or Minimum Wage or any of the other things they rail against? It's completely retarded and ass-backwards; they want to make it easy for all the manufacturing to come home while at the same time forcing every web-based company overseas. How the fuck does that benefit us at all, especially when those tech jobs are generally better paying and thus better stimulate the economy?
The companies that stand to lose the most with this shit are among some of the few American companies actually doing well at this point. This entire situation is total fucking lunacy...
Plus, some of the complaints are bullshit; for instance, the whole "serving information directly" thing, i.e., the way typing in a company's NYSE abbreviation brings up the little Google Finance thing with the current stock price and recent trends instead of giving results to a bunch of financial firms and shit. For the vast majority of users, they don't want to go digging around for a fucking answer to a simple question, they just want the answer. Typing "2 + 2" does not mean "give me links to online calculators."
The only companies complaining about shit like that are companies that are trying to monetize public information, which is bullshit anyway. Forcing information to be obfuscated so as to force people to dig around on random third party sites seems like a step completely in the wrong direction in terms of progress.
Rather than trading one set of people buying off our government for another set, how about these tech companies band together and help force a real dialog on campaign reform? If they truly care about freedom and rights, they should be advocating for causes beyond those which directly effect their own bottom line.
All I'm saying is, if corporations are people, they're some pretty goddamned selfish people. Is there any corporation out there that could be called "altruistic"? I've never heard of one. What board would even tolerate altruism if it didn't line their own pockets? Even humanitarian efforts and charitable giving is often for tax purposes or so they can throw commercials on TV showing everybody how great they are, i.e., advertising.
I laud the efforts of these tech companies, but I would respect it a lot more if they were standing up as citizens of this country, not as people that stand to lose money financially due to this legislation.
Ditto. First I'd heard it, and definitely using that from now on when referring to it...
They should start by targeting the entire U.S. and other "pro-SOPA" countries and leave the other countries alone. Why punish people all over the world just because a small minority of people in the U.S. are corrupt douchebag cockheads?
Targeting only D.C. isn't going to do much...the vast majority of the people, particularly legislators, that are supporting this legislation hardly even use the web.
Although this can backfire, as certain people (my brother, for instance), when he spies one of those "my car is so amazing I'm going to park across 3 spaces in the back of the lot" situations makes it a point to properly park in a space directly next to said car regardless of how many spaces there are closer.
Some people may consider it a dick move, but based on the nasty comments that he's gotten from those people the few times I was present and there was actually a confrontation about it, I'd say it's a dick move against a dickhead that thinks he's special, so it's hard to feel too bad about it. It's also funny how many people feel they are entitled to a 50 foot buffer around their car just because it cost more money than others.
Yeah, my experiences with Charter have been about the same over the last 10 years I've been a customer of theirs. The only time I ever had a tech that seemed like he knew anything (and didn't just try to bullshit me) was recently, and even then it took a problem being escalated to the supervisor's supervisor to get that kind of attention. Turns out the "shitty wiring in the walls that was preventing [me] from getting more than 4 meg that would never be repaired unless the landlord tore all the walls out and rewired the building" was actually a faulty node that was blasting everyone in this complex with so much noise on the lines that anything beyond regular web surfing didn't work for shit (and even that worked like crap during peak, which was always the excuse, "it's peak usage, sorry, nothing can be done". It took a year of complaints from everyone in this complex until they finally investigated and found the problem with the node and, when they replaced/repaired it, holy shit, everything started working again. Imagine that...
If there was any other alternative that offered similar speeds, I would switch, but unfortunately my choice is them or DSL that tops out at 7 meg for the same price. Either way, their Level 3 guy openly admitted that most of the lower level techs know enough to plug the shit in and do basic troubleshooting, but that's about it. However, he did say that 99% of the time the problem is user error related to people not knowing how to plug the shit in or connect to the network, so maybe that's why? Either way, though, I could do without the bullshit answers. I've had the problems blamed on my router more often than I can count (even though that's complete bullshit), and funny, that always segues into trying to get me to rent one from them for $7 a month. Uh, yeah, no thanks...
They didn't say they changed their minds at all, they said "GoDaddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it." Notice they didn't say "SOPA is wrong" or "SOPA will break the internet" or anything negative about SOPA at all, they just withdrew their support based on the community at large moving their domains at a lightning rate.
The fact that they didn't see this coming is mind boggling to me. The vast majority of their customer base stands to lose the few rights they have left as conferred by the DMCA and it's "Safe Harbor" provisions. It'd be like 7-11 supporting laws designed to make tobacco products illegal, or McDonalds supporting laws that would limit how much fast food people are allowed to consume. Why would they actively try to piss off a huge segment of their customer base? Dumbasses...
Debt collectors are already doing shit like this now. There have been a few big ones busted in New York state that I remember reading about. Half the time the firm attempting to collect the debt can't produce proof that they even own the rights to collect it.
So yeah, once we "get government out of the way" and allow these companies to legally use methods like this, I'm sure it won't be long before every major company has their own tracksuit-wearing 'Persuasion Specialists' wielding baseball bats and broken hockey sticks...
The idea of credit is bullshit to most Chinese people I know and they think it is crazy to rack up debt like that. It's a cultural thing. Why does VISA get 3% of my revenue (not profit) just for being there? Fuck that shit. Cash mother fuckers. Cash. I am paraphrasing a friend who owns a tea shop.
Cash is also great when you're trying to hide income from the IRS. Not saying that your friends are trying to cheat the government, but it's certainly much easier when there is no paper trail. A family acquaintance owns a few laundromats and has openly bragged to us about how easy it is to funnel money out of there without anyone knowing anything because it's completely cash-based.
Maybe they're bullshitting, maybe not...just repeating what I was told.
As I said in response above:
As for the pennies (again, emphasis mine):
The pertinent portion of law that applies to your question is the Coinage Act of 1965, specifically Section 31 U.S.C. 5103, entitled "Legal tender," which states: "United States coins and currency (including Federal reserve notes and circulating notes of Federal reserve banks and national banks) are legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues."
This statute means that all United States money as identified above are a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor. There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether or not to accept cash unless there is a State law which says otherwise. For example, a bus line may prohibit payment of fares in pennies or dollar bills. In addition, movie theaters, convenience stores and gas stations may refuse to accept large denomination currency (usually notes above $20) as a matter of policy. Source
Granted, Verizon probably has negotiated a better rate, but each transaction is probably costing not much less than $2.
According to their 2010 Q4 report (the first one I found, there may be a more recent one but it doesn't really matter) they have 102.2 million connections to 94.1 million total customers. If just half their customers pay their bill online (probably much higher percentage, but for the sake of argument) that's 47.05 million card not present transactions being run. Assuming that the average bill is just $50 (probably a low estimate, but again, sake of argument) you're looking at $10.351 million just to cover the initial .22 cent fee. Add the 2% transaction value to that $50 charge and you're looking at $1.22 per payment, or $57.401 million a month, or $688,812,000 a year.
I just can't believe that they would pay that just to take customer payments, even a company as large as Verizon, and even if they were, I can't believe that they wouldn't have inserted mechanisms to pass this fee along to consumers long before now.
Obviously I have no proof (I would be highly interested to hear what they really pay, as would many people I'm sure) but I just can't believe that this isn't opportunism being masqueraded about as necessity. I have seen nothing out of Verizon or any other company to lead me to believe that they would ever resist the urge to make a quick buck at customer expense, especially tens of millions of customers, the vast majority of which are locked into a contract with stiff penalties for early termination.
If someone from within Verizon can show me something that refutes my opinion, I will happily modify it. Like I said, I am really curious how much of these "costs" originate directly from external causes. We've been hearing a lot of the "don't blame $CORPORATION, blame regulations/fees/D.C.!!" meme over the last year or so every time they find a new way to increase their revenues and it's getting a little old at this point. Just my personal feelings on the issue...
As for the "imposing new fees on existing customers" thing, that's easy (emphasis mine):
You agree to pay all access, usage and other charges that you or the user of your wireless device incurred. For Postpay Service, our charges also include Federal Universal Service, Regulatory and Administrative Charges, and we may also include other charges related to our governmental costs. We set these charges; they aren't taxes, they aren't required by law, they are not necessarily related to anything the government does, they are kept by us in whole or in part, and the amounts and what they pay for may change. Source
As for the pennies (again, emphasis mine):
The pertinent portion of law that applies to your question is the Coinage Act of 1965, specifically Section 31 U.S.C. 5103, entitled "Legal tender," which states: "United States coins and currency (including Federal reserve notes and circulating notes of Federal reserve banks and national banks) are legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues."
This statute means that all United States money as identified above are a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor. There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether or not to accept cash unless there is a State law which says otherwise. For example, a bus line may prohibit payment of fares in pennies or dollar bills. In addition, movie theaters, convenience stores and gas stations may refuse to accept large denomination currency (usually notes above $20) as a matter of policy.
Source
No private entity has to accept any currency they do not wish to, and that is solely at the discretion of said business, unless the law states otherwise. I believe some states have laws dealing with this on the books, but Federally speaking, you can accept or not accept whatever you want.
That simply means that it is legal currency, which has nothing whatsoever to do with whether you have to accept it. Like I said, the same mechanisms that allow a vendor to not accept large amounts of change are what allows businesses not to take large bills, and pretty much every gas station and convenience store does so. It is also what allows a business not to take a bill that is in poor shape. For instance, I once had someone attempt to pay me in money that, no shit, had blood on it. A couple times it smelled like it had urine or feces on it. For a less extreme example, there were more occasions when someone wanted to pay me with money out of their bra or waistband, completely soaked with sweat to the point where the bills stuck to their hands as they tried to count it out. Needless to say, I would not accept those bills, and yeah, the customers were pissed off, but in the end, they either got a method of payment that wasn't a biohazard or they abandoned the sale.
There is no law that says that a vendor has to accept your method of payment, even cash. There are many businesses that don't even keep cash on hand. For instance, car dealerships. If you show up with a bag full of money wanting to buy a car, there's no legal obligation that they have to sell you one. If you show up at the dealership to pay your car payment with a bag full of pennies, likewise, they're under no obligation to take them. The fact that it is payment of a debt or to purchase something is immaterial.
Now, the government, yeah, I believe they have to accept cash, but I don't even think they are necessarily required to accept bulk change payments on the spot, i.e., some pissed off person showing up to the treasurers office with a wheelbarrow full of pennies. Back in June, a guy showed up to his local offices with 2,500 pennies, dumped them on the counter, and ended up with a citation for disorderly conduct for his troubles.