So remember how I had to replace all my credit cards and was waiting to see which accounts I’d need to update? I overlooked one. A very important one! Internet! So our internet account almost got cut off. To make sure it wouldn’t, I decided to call in and pay by phone.

It turns out that my local ISP was purchased by a larger ISP and the larger ISP has lower prices for faster maximum speeds. So, because I actually called in because I screwed up, I now have a better deal.

Of course, a part of me wanted to know why in the world they hadn’t called me to tell me about this amazing new opportunity. Other than the fact that they were previously giving me less while charging me more for it and that’s a pretty good deal for them. So I asked. She said that all customers were called and notified. I almost objected, but then I remembered what I always do when I get a call from the cable company: Tell them I’m not interested. Oops.

I also had a startlingly good interaction with Verizon wherein I will now be getting more for less rather than less for more.

I’m on a roll. Albeit not necessarily for the right reasons.

We were pretty late in filling out our 2010 taxes, because the student loan people couldn’t get us the information that we needed. But we are supposed to be getting a refund in the ballpark of $12,500 dollars. I’m beginning to wonder if that money isn’t fictitious. When I filled it out, I requested Direct Deposit. Apparently, if you’re post-deadline, they can’t do that. So I sent it in by mail. A month or so later, we got a letter saying that they couldn’t do direct deposit and that they would be sending it to us by mail. Contact them if it hasn’t arrived in 3-4 weeks. 5-6 weeks later, and it still hasn’t arrived. So I call the IRS. They tell me that they’ve sent it before they even sent the letter saying that they were going to send it. So now I have to fill out a form to inquire where the check is. They will then investigate and get back to me. That’s going to be another 6-8 weeks. The only problem is that I didn’t write down the information on which day they sent the check, which the form needs. So now I am going to have to call the IRS again.

I’ve also been having to make calls to various banks, cancelling the credit/debit cards on my lost wallet and requesting replacements. Three cheers for Discover, who had a new one out to me in two days. By two days, I thought they meant three. I thought that if I called on Sunday, they’d mail it out on Monday and it would arrive on Wednesday. It arrived early Tuesday. The Bank of the Northern Hemisphere was less responsive, giving me what I had expected from everybody: either five to seven (for debit) or five to 10 days (for credit). The cards are coming from Lakota, which is in our mailing unit, so I’m hoping it’ll be close to the former. This is important because I will be heading to Vegas on Wednesday and it would be helpful to have more plastic rather than less (though never again will I have all my plastic in a single wallet. Back to Discover, the only annoying thing about that process was that, when it came to activating my card, they made me talk to a live person who had a script about asking me what I loved about my Discover Card. I truthfully answered: “You got me a new card in two days.”

The last round of phone involved medical bills. Evidently, our insurance company carries nothing when it comes to pregnancy. I’ve never seen so many “Insurance payments: $0” in my life. In the first case, they simply didn’t have our insurance information. So I played phone tag for four days while we tried to get that situated. After looking at all of the other bills, I am expecting that insurance won’t pay for anything anyway. There are arguments against insurance covering pregnancy, though it brings up one of my constant irritations with our health care system, which is that you never know if something will be paid for until after you do it.

It’s hard not to get a chuckle from this:

The cheap signs smashed into lawns and along the corners of busy intersections are hard to miss. “We Buy Junk Cars!” ”Cash for Your House!” ”Computer Repair.” The eyesores have vexed Hollywood Mayor Peter Bober for the past few years as he wastes valuable resources plucking up the signs only to watch them pop up in even greater numbers.

While stopped at a red light a few months ago, Bober studied the unsightly signs and came to a realization that would help him fight their proliferation: The criminals had left their calling cards in the form of business phone numbers.

“These people want us to call them, so let’s call them so much their head spins,” said Bober, who bought a $300 software program in March that makes robocalls to the businesses. The volume of calls has reached as high as 20 calls each to 90 businesses in a day.

Not sure if it’s legal, but I like it if it is. I’ve had that thought before. It’s not like we don’t know who is putting up the signs. The companies in question can say “Hey, that must have been done by some overenthusiastic boy we hired, sorry or whatever” or something, but this gives a particular incentive for them to take it down. There’s little more obnoxious than repeated calls. And unlike tickets, you don’t end up losing money due to court costs (if the businesses are smart, they collect the fines and then go to court and demand a separate hearing on each ticket).

The other day, I actually came to the defense of cell phone companies. Sort of. I basically argued that we are better off with the national consolidations we have than we were in a more competitive market with more local and regional carriers. So I guess I had it coming when later that day my carrier, Verizon, pissed me off. So much so that I am considering returning the phones we have on order and going off-contract.

Our contract ends two days from now. I looked around and determined that yes, we are to be with Verizon for at least two more years. It also turns out that we are due for some cell phone upgrades to finally leave Windows Mobile Island. Android is finally ready for me, or ready enough (more on this later, if anyone cares). So it all works out.

The truth is, I hate being under contract. I avoided it for years and years by buying my own cell phones. But two years ago, Verizon basically made an offer I couldn’t refuse. And then, as now except even moreso, I was sure that I was in for at least a two-year haul. I’m less sure that’s the case now, but still pretty sure. AT&T has raised prices to the point that they’ve lost their price advantage and I don’t like their cell phone selection as much. Sprint and T-Mobile are not options.

So I sign up to extend the contract and lo-and-behold, Verizon has joined the other carriers in offering an “upgrade fee.” It’s $30 a line. Truthfully, I’m paying $200 less than I had budgeted for on the subsidized phones, so the $60 doesn’t bother me in the slightest. But on principle, I am really angry about this. It reminds me why I hate cell phone companies and why I don’t like being tied to any single one of them.

So why does this irritate me? Because they’ve made it abundantly clear they want me under contract. They provide all of the incentives to get me to reluctantly agree to sign on for a period of time in exchange for a cheaper phone. So why are they charging me for something they want me to do? Like it’s a convenience for me to not be able to change carriers or downgrade service for two years? If they’re not making enough money on the subsidized phones plus contract, then charge more for the dang phones. Rationally, this is a distinction without a difference. Except that this way they get to tack on the $30 only after your mouth is watering at the new toy.

I struggle, however, to come up with a rational basis not to move forward. As long as we’re with Verizon on our current data plans for another year, which is a given, we end up ahead. There is the possibility of downgrading Dr. Wife’s plan since she doesn’t use data all that much, but I remain eternally hopeful that she will someday use the phone to its capability. There are various companies I boycott or avoid due to what I consider dishonest, antagonistic, or otherwise bad business practices (Best Buy, HP for a while, and one other one whose name escapes me). This is a reminder that there are no cell phone companies for which this is not the case.

As the header image, I primarily smoke three different brands of cigarettes: USA Gold, Maverick, and Liggett. When I am out of pocket, I will sometimes go with Winston or Camel. When I first started smoking, I went with the gold standard: Marlboro. Eventually I found suitable cheaper replacement brands in Doral and Pall Mall. Over time, both either watered down their product or they stopped doing the same thing for me. The above three are both inexpensive and either reasonably or very strong tasting.

USA Gold is the cheapest of the set. The problem with USA Gold is that it has the word Gold in the title. This means two things: First, they are similar in name to Old Golds, which are more popular, more expensive and less worthy. Second, as with other brands they come in various strengths. They can’t call the lighter variations lights or ultra-lights anymore, so they go by color. Almost universally, light cigarettes have gold color. I prefer red-color. So I have to specify that I want USA Gold 100s RED. If I leave off the red, the gold is in their minds and if I’m not looking, I just bought a weaker cigarette than I intended to. This happened recently. Very frustrating.

Mavericks and Liggetts do not have the weakness problem. In fact, I think their limited popularity is due to their rough taste. Mavericks used to be Harley Davidson cigarettes and for a while (even after they became Maverick) had an awesome black-and-gold box with an eagle on it that would be different in color depending on what you were getting. Now they’re colored similarly to all of the others. My wife hates Mavericks and can smell them from two miles away. Liggetts fall in between the two. They’re the most expensive of the three. Both Maverick and Liggett take a toll on the lungs more quickly than USA Gold.

Living in a small town as I do, I have an internal catalog of what is offered where. What’s rather frustrating is that all of them seem to lack good inventory control. Which is to say, when they run out of boxes, they don’t get more until they’ve run out of softpacks. The fact that they always have left over soft packs suggests to me that that they ought to stock more of those than the boxes. The same goes for regular size versus 100s. I go to the Supply Store a lot, and would get all of my cigarettes from there, but they go months with only the short packs and soft packs, and so they lose my business for weeks at a time.

Way back in the day, when Mom smoked and I didn’t, I did not understand why the hell cigarette brand mattered. They didn’t offer Kent in our home state, and so whenever we were the next state over she would buy a bunch of them. How different can something you’re lighting on fire and consuming the smoke taste? Pretty different, it turns out.

On a sidenote, I don’t think the main reason for my preference for strong flavor is that I have particularly strong lungs (I don’t) or even my diminished tastebuds, but rather because I don’t inhale. Never have. Didn’t even realize I was supposed to, when I first tried them. Which is not the same thing as saying that they don’t get into my lungs. But not through breaking it in from the cigarette itself. The other big reason is my preference for longer-lasting 100s, which tend to have longer filters.

HalfSigma has a post tying together money, class, and race(ism). Obviously, I am going to be focusing on the first two (I may be lightening up as far as this goes, but not that much). As is often the case, he mixes insights with false assumptions. On the latter score, he says:

I think the people who are most opposed to an increase in the minimum wage are those making slightly more than the minimum wage. For the guy making $12/hour, an increase in the minimum wage from $7 to $10 would be a mighty blow to his feelings of success. But people making six figures are so far insulated from making $7/hour that they just don’t suffer the least bit of worry that increasing the minimum wage would lower their own status.

This is, by my experience and observation, entirely wrong. First, because non-minimum low wages tend to go up with the minimum wage in order to differentiate themselves from those making minimum wage. If you’re paying someone 50c above minimum wage, you’re likely going to continue to do so in order to attract the better candidates among those making minimum wage. I was working at near-minimum when it went up from $4.25 an hour. It went up in two increments, I switched jobs between the increments, and both empoyers raise our wages a 45c at a time. Unions, it’s worthy of noting, are generally supportive of minimum wage increases even though their guys (and gals) are not directly affected by them.

The paragraph before and after that one aren’t entirely wrong, but I believe them to be incomplete:

One (but certainly not the only) important differentiator is money. Having more money makes you feel superior to those who have less money. But money just sitting in a bank account doesn’t demonstrate this very well. Thus did Thorstein Veblen coined the phrase “conspicuous consumption.” But you should also be aware that people who spend money seldom think about conspicuous consumption, because a lot of this behavior works on the subconscious level. Driving around in a ten-year-old Hyundai just causes people to have feelings of inferiority when they see other people drive by in more expensive cars. We are less likely to feel envy of people’s bank accounts because they are invisible and there’s a social taboo for people to speak about them.

This paragraph overlooks a different tendency: to roll one’s eyes at those who buy needlessly expensive cars and other conspicuous items. When I see someone driving a Range Rover, I don’t think “I wish I could afford a Range Rover.” I think “Sucker.” As much as I would like to say that this is a result of my being completely oblivious to conspicuous value, it’s not. At least, it’s not entirely so. I bought the Subaru Forester new because it was the best value for what we needed. However, I am extremely self-conscious about it. The appearance of it actually bothers me, just a little. I’m one of those guys who buys new cars. It’s indicative of a reverse snobbery. I thought more of myself because I drove a lesser car. At the time, I attributed it to my practicality. But here I am self-conscious about a car that I bought primarily because it made sense.

Which brings me to another paragraph…

There are other ways to feel superior to other people besides having more money than them. This is what Class X is about. If you voluntarily (or involuntarily) choose a career that doesn’t offer the greatest monetary rewards, then you look to other ways to feel superior. This is what the whole SWPL movement is about, participating in a culture that makes you feel superior to proles making the same money as you.

I am not sure this is about the proles, actually. To the extent that we’re going to psychoanalyze, I think it’s about other non-proles. If you can’t sing good, sing loud. Let’s say that you are someone who was raised in a solidly middle class household. Let’s say that you are not temperamentally or intellectually suited for the rat race. Well gosh, if you forgo the rat-race altogether, then by-golly you are better than all those other sheeple. You may have less money, but it isn’t because you would have fared poorly in the money-making world if you had tried, but rather it’s because you chose not to race. When you can’t compete in set of criteria, choose a different one. Then, per that other paragraph, look down on the consumption habits of those who lack the insight that you have.

I am presently reading Melissa F. Miller’s Irreparable Harm. I didn’t buy it, but rather “checked it out” from Amazon Prime’s free check-out program. The way that it works is that you can check out one book a month. You can keep it for more than a month, if you choose, but but there’s still the maximum of one.

Having a maximum is fair. They want us to buy books and if checking-out becomes too easy, we can do that instead of buying. I totally get that. Here is what I don’t get, though: they should give us more incentive to buy the book. If, for instance, they said “Hey, buy the book that you have checked out and you can check out another book.” It’s the perfect try-before-you-buy. The more you buy, the more you can try. Now, I can take the $4 it would cost to buy Irreparable Harm and buy some other book for that amount, and in the end I will have read two books and purchased one, but I actually think it would be a better to encourage people to buy books that have been checked out. Among other things, it would encourage publishers to allow people to check out their books.

There may be a broader idea here where for every $10 you spend on ebooks, you can check out one for free. That might be an even better idea. I mean, I could see some potential hazard with someone who buys a lot of books reading a lot of other books for free. I’m not sure that giving too much to people who are spending a lot of money is a bad idea, exactly, but even if I am wrong about that, I am still struggling to see a downside to allowing me to get an extra rental by buying the book I just checked out. The author wins. I win. Amazon wins. Who loses?

That’s the case that Daniel Indiviglio made in The Atlantic last year:

If you look to industries where compensation is common knowledge, then you find employees that have far better success achieving more pay. One clear example is Wall Street. At investment banks, salary transparency isn’t encouraged, but bankers and traders just can’t help themselves. After all, many are obsessed with money. So come bonus season, they compare packages and relay information from firm to firm. Industry publications even include league tables to show which banks pay better than others.

Salary transparency is also quite strong among chief executives across the economy. Public companies are required to report this information. Is it any coincidence that executive pay has been rising over the past few decades? Each CEO wants to be paid above average, so pay ticks up.

This brings to mind some causality problems. People that get a lot of scrutiny, such as chief executives and athletes and such, where people are most likely to know the salaries to begin with. This creates not just higher wages, but distortions (at least in the case of CEO’s). Where people are a brand name, and they’re not just paying for actual performance, but for the brand. In the case of Wall Street, people are most likely to talk about how much they make precisely because they’re doing well. At least, I think that’s more likely than the notion that they’re doing well because they talk about how much they make.

I don’t know how I feel about the proposal overall. A few jobs back, at Falstaff where I was working when I started Hit Coffee, we talked regularly about how much we were making. It did not, actually, result in higher wages. It did result in a fair amount of resentment. My resentment, to be precise. There was a guy named Edgar (some of you may remember him) who was… not bright. He was perpetually one of the worst two employees in our department. We started the same week. But Edgar made more than I did. Five cents an hour more. And it drove me crazy. Five cents an hour became an actual point of resentment. Pay within the department was relatively uniform, but for the five cent raise he asked for at just the right time to get it (he didn’t ask for such a paltry raise, but that was all they were willing to give him. But after that, they refused to give anything to anybody). Due to circumstance, I’ve historically been overqualified and underpaid, and that never bothered me like the Edgar thing. We were at the same place, doing the same job (indeed, when I got a promotion without a raise, I was above him and making less).

Even though we weren’t supposed to talk about it, we always did and management actually used this to their advantage. No one could say that Jack didn’t deserve a raise, but they couldn’t give one to him without also giving one to Joe. Yes, Jack deserved it and Joe did not deserve it, but such things are bad for morale. With some exception, I would actually expect pay transparency used in this way more than any other. Not preventing disparities between different jobs, but completely flattening them within departments and job descriptions. This could be good for things like wage equality across genders and such, but from a productivity perspective is problematic. Because it will, the vast majority of the time, breed resentment the more than people know that other people are making more at them at the same job. That some people are more valued than others.

And yet… I am a critic of the status quo of treating unequal employees equally. I have noticed, in my professional life, that over and over again that not nearly enough care is taken to avoid losing the best employees (we can’t give Jack a raise) and too much effort is made to accommodate the worthless employees (We can’t fire Joe, he has a family to support). This isn’t hard policy, exactly, but the way that things often work. At Falstaff, for example, there was the assumption that nobody was going to be able to find a better job, so they should be kissing the feet of Falstaff for giving them one that paid them a solid $10/hr. And yet, at the same time, until the budget absolutely forced them to, nobody wanted to fire Edgar, who had a wife and four kids to support and was an all-around decent guy. So the end result is that, contrary to their belief that nobody can find other work, they lost the ones that were talented and skilled enough to actually find other work, while the Edgars stuck around. My criticism of this is at odds with my apprehension about wage transparency.

There has been a recent spate of articles about lost smartphones. ArsTechnica talks about what you could lose if you lost your smartphone. BoingBoing talks about that and also about ways to protect yourself:

–Always protect your phone with a password or a “draw to unlock” pattern.

–Use security software designed specifically for smartphones to lock up programs on your phone. Some of these programs can be used to help locate the phone, or to wipe its memory from remote locations.

–Don’t lose your cell phone. This falls under the category of “Well, duh.” Nobody loses a smartphone on purpose, obviously. But try to make sure you keep it in you pocket or purse when not in use.

–Companies that issue phones to their employees should make sure to train workers on security, and should secure every phone with passwords.

The last time I lost a smartphone, it was at a movie theater. It had fallen out of my holster (an usher found it and I got it back). Because of that, and a few instances of it jumping out of the holster as I ran, I stopped using that particular holster with that particular phone. That, more or less, sums up my idea of “security.” Wiping a phone from a remote location might become an option, if more sensitive information ends up on my phone. But those locks are a pain in the posterior. Also, as someone points out, how is someone supposed to return the phone to you (if they are so inclined) if they don’t have any information? Well, you can incessantly call the phone, but it actually makes me wonder why contact information isn’t left on the Lock screen. Can anyone think of a reason not to do this? Also, in case of an emergency, where you are not conscious, people can use your phone to contact an ICE number.

These are the rationalizations I use to avoided the dreaded lock screen.

I did want to address something written a while ago at Forbes and that I have seen written over and over again elsewhere. The question of why we don’t expect cell phone carriers to help find lost phones, even though they could:

In short, Nevius notes that carriers in some other places – Australia, for instance – maintain a joint database of mobile phone serial numbers. When a number is reported stolen, the phone is rendered inoperative. That’s not what the U.S. carriers do. They focus on remote wiping, and making SIM cards invalid. But Nevius notes that thieves can simply replace the bad SIM cards with new ones. And he points out that when phones are stolen, carriers benefit as consumer buy replacement phones.

The piece opens with the words “prepare to get angry,” but my anger (to the extent that I have any) is actually directed at the author and people saying what the author is saying. We do not want to make cell phone carriers to do this. While it might be nice if they did… once we place this burden on them (whether by statute or expectation) we are giving them the justification they need to do bad things. Do you know what’s cheaper than helping someone find their lost phone? Refusing to activate phones that they don’t sell you. AT&T and T-Mobile, to their credit, will activate any phone. Verizon and Sprint, however, do not. Even phones that would work on their network. They will only let you activate a phone that they improve. They publicly talk of it as quality assurance, but it’s also a good way to force people to buy phones. Well, with this, we could force us to buy phones from them. The secondary cell phone market allows people to buy cheap phones without signing on to a burdensome contract. Is there any doubt that at least some of the companies would love an excuse to do away with it entirely?

Granted, you could pass a regulation that forces carriers to find lost phones and forbids them from refusing to activate phones that they didn’t sell you, but that might require an act of congress. And if it doesn’t, the fact that nobody who is harping on the carriers has even mentioned the possibility of the above paragraph suggests to me that they are thinking too narrowly and wouldn’t think such a regulation through, throwing the carriers into a briar patch.

TheNextWeb’s Insider has an article aboutbehavioral pricing that I found interesting. The intro:

What if when you bought a new Macbook, the price was higher because your tweets constantly referenced your love and devotion for Apple? What if Orbitz used the fact that your Facebook Likes include “Party Rocking in Miami” to charge you more for a flight to Miami?

This is called online behavioral pricing. It’s a consumer’s worst nightmare as it uses the traces of your online identity to maximize prices on the products and services you want most. It’s also an ecommerce merchant’s dream.

Behavioral pricing is a form of price discrimination. The goal of price discrimination is to maximize profits by adjusting the price that different customers pay based on data about the consumer. Price discrimination is common offline, such as the Museum of Modern Art charging adults $25 but students only $14.

We’ve already seen online merchants make preliminary attempts at this. When the New York Times unveiled its digital subscriptions, it decided to charge $15 per month to subscribe on your clunky old Blackberry, but $20 per month to subscribe on your iPad. Yet, it doesn’t cost the New York Times more to deliver content to the iPad. Instead the assumption was that you, the owner of a $500 tablet, would be more willing to pay than your average smartphone user. But this rudimentary price discrimination is a mere hint of what’s coming with behavioral pricing…

It’s an interesting idea, but far from inevitable. It contains a huge blindspot: price discrimination is held in check by unidentified buyers. You can charge different amounts to different people based on perceived needs, sure. But you have to post a price. And if you won’t post the price until you know who the buyer is, or they set the default price too high, unidentified buyers will move on. The Applyte in the example can simply log on to a different browser and/or fiddle with cookies and see what an unidentified buyer would pay. That sounds like a hassle, but if you’re worried about behavior pricing, keeping a separate browser with high privacy settings for price-checking becomes quite rational. Or, if the prices are so close together that it’s not rational, then I don’t see it as a huge problem.

What the author seems to be talking about seems, to me, to require people to actually be logged in (to a Facebook account, say, or PayPal). People might stay logged in to Facebook, but I don’t think they’re going to refuse to show you a price if you aren’t logged in to Facebook. And PayPal you won’t be logged in to until you’re ready to pay for it. Cookies are avoidable. IP addresses are problematic. Browser histories can be erased. In other words, they can only do this until the consumer gets wind of it and realizes that they might get a better deal by logging out. So if it happens, it’ll more likely be by way of discounts. You start at a price for the unidentified buyer and then, if you have someone that fits certain things, you knock the price down from there. Rather than upping the price for the Applyte, you might actually be better off lowering it because they are more likely to buy more Apple things in the future. Set the price for the unidentified buyer too high, you’ll likely lose customers.

So I guess I don’t disagree that behavioral pricing is a possibility, but I think its application is actually somewhat limited by the unidentified buyer. Transparent pricing has economic utility.

Tangential, but I got a kick out of this somewhat related article:
How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did

And yeah, that does creep me out a little, but in the end it’s about offering people products that they might specifically need. Websites are pushing things based on my browsing all the time. I’d rather see an ad for Thinkpads than tampons.