Category Archives: Market
Megan McArdle writes about a new breed of debt collectors:
The last decade or so has given rise to a new version of an old phenomenon: the bottom feeding debt buyer. It’s often thought of as being linked to the bad economy, and perhaps it is, a little bit–businesses in trouble are probably more willing to look to their old collections as a source of revenue. But it’s also a result of increasing improvements in computer technology. It’s easier to aggregate very small amounts–say, hundreds of unpaid co-pays from a doctor’s office. Those debts can be unloaded at pennies on the dollar to firms which then use the interwebs to find their victims debtors and dun them for cash.
Often these firms don’t bother with the abusive high-pressure tactics that are used for large sums–the hourly wage on collecting $29.99 just isn’t a good use of resources. But that’s small comfort, because instead, they file blizzards of lawsuits against people who they can’t find, resulting in default judgements against someone who may not owe the money, or may not realize they owe. And those hundreds of aggregated small debts hit the credit reports of people who probably didn’t intend to skip out on a $15.87 termination fee when they canceled some utility, but now can’t get a car loan because there’s a black mark on their credit.
We’ve been getting calls lately from a debt collector. To be more precise, Clancy has. She doesn’t answer the phone when she doesn’t recognize the number, but I answered once when I was working on her phone. There wasn’t even a live voice on the other side of the line. Just a recording saying something to the effect of “The law requires us to notify you that we are a debt collector. Please stay on the line for the next available representative.”
I did not stay on the line. My thinking at the time was that there was no way that it was legitimately a debt collector calling for Clancy because she almost never gave out that number to anybody. She almost never gets calls on it from anyone that isn’t family or her work. How would they have that number? Neither when I picked up nor when we let it go to voicemail did they ever identify who they were trying to collect the debt from. Or for, which is also important because we’re pretty sure we don’t owe anybody money (except for her student loans) Most likely, I reasoned, it was someone that had a wrong number.
Then I thought of a possibility where it might not be a wrong number. It would be possible, for instance, that she put her cell phone down as a backup number and that they tried calling our line in either Estacado or Cascadia and since that was disconnected, they reverted to using her cell. When I gave Clancy her new phone, I took over her old one. Next time I will stay on the line just to confirm that they’re looking for someone else. And, of course, they haven’t called since. We’ve been holding on to that phone number just so that I can take the dang calls that wouldn’t stop coming before but haven’t come in a month. So apparently I am going to have to call them about a debt we don’t think we have from parties unknown.
Several years ago I got some mail about some money I allegedly owed what it looked like was the phone company. I called the number and dealt with a young woman that was incapable of doing anything but reading from a script. Any time I asked so much as who the debt was owed to she would read the part of the script accusing me of being unwilling to pay and outlining the repercussions of failing to pay. At some point during the conversation, I noticed that my name wasn’t even on the letter. So I asked who owed the money. She actually had the gumption to claim that was confidential information and that she couldn’t tell me and that if I refused to pay the money the repercussions would be…
I finally asked to speak to her supervisor, who was less stingy with the information. Though he was not willing to tell me who I owed the debt to or who I was supposed to be, he was willing to tell me what the debt was for. Apparently, someone was willing to pay $80 for a dress catalog. That was all I needed to know in order to know that the debt was absolutely not mine. As he explained the repercussions of what would happen if I did not pay the debt, I hung up.
I purchased an item on eBay a while back and the vendor has been really great. There was a problem with what they sent me and we’ve been going back and forth on it for a while now. They’ve been very receptive and most of the misunderstandings causing the delay have been on my end.
In another case, I ordered a product. It took longer than expected to get here, but I can’t say that they did anything wrong exactly. They just weren’t as upfront about everything as I might have liked. But they offer a product at a good price and I don’t want to hurt them.
The result: Both get the same feedback ratings.
eBay works on a 5-star systems. The problem is that if you give a seller anything less than five stars, it counts as negative feedback and makes things more difficult for them. So it makes me really reluctant to leave feedback saying “Oh, well they were not great but they were not bad either.” The only thing I can do is just not leave feedback at all. If this is going to be the case, they really should just have a Yes/No on whether or not I would do business with them in the future. There are probably cases where someone has tarred a seller that they generally liked.
But more than anything, I want to be able to actively endorse the first seller. I want to actively endorse another seller from whom I have bought a number of things. I want to give them a special gold star. I want other buyers to know that if there is any problem, they will take care of you. I could put something in the textbox, though they would probably not want everyone to know that they sold a defective product where further action was required. In my mind, that’s no big deal as long as it is made right in the end (if it’s something I am really concerned about, I’ll just get it from eBay or Amazon). But some people expect more from eBay than I do.
That brings me to another complaint, which is that if I leave feedback, I have to leave something in the text box. Sometimes I don’t have a whole lot to say. “They met expectations”? “They sent me the item within a reasonable time frame”? I wish I could just leave that blank because as with the stars anything that isn’t glowing is kinda negative. You should see the feedback they leave for me. All I did was buy the product and pay them, for goodness sake. I would prefer it if the feedback actually meant something. Like in the first case if they had said something like “Buyer very patient with product problem” or something. Instead, those folks left feedback before I even got the item saying “GREAT BUYER!! HOPE TO DO BUSINESS AGAIN!!” or somesuch.
It’s like the feedback system is designed to be as unhelpful as possible. Not even in the sense of covering for bad sellers because eBay is pretty anal about that from what I understand (hence, 4 of 5 stars hurting sellers). Just in the sense of not being able to tell if a buyer is really any good or not. Contrast this with Newegg, where people leave all kinds of reviews of products. There I can see what the negative reviews are (which no one is afraid to leave) and look for patterns and potential problems. For eBay this could mean that “Oh, well they’re not particularly fast on shipping. I can deal with that.” or deciding to move on without their rates being jacked up by eBay for someone leaving negative feedback.
Inflation happens, but it’s truly astonishing what has happened to soft drink prices over the last decade or so. I suppose these things stand out more to me than many others because I live in a world of technology where things tend to get cheaper rather than more expensive over time. But if you look at other food items, it doesn’t seem like they’ve gone up nearly as much as soft drinks.
I remember bottles reached 99 cents. This was significant because it marked the first time that soft drinks were cheaper from a vending machine than a convenience store. Once you accounted for sales tax, anyway. I thought that it was this bizarre anomaly that wouldn’t last. The reason, it seemed to me, was simply that the vending machine people like the nice round $1 and would be slower to move it up from $1 to $1.25 than they were from 75 cents to a dollar. But it’s more or less been that way ever since. I guess the vending machines are cheap enough to maintain that they don’t have to charge as much to make a profit. In fact, the disparity has increased. Soft drink prices in convenience stores seem to be around $1.70 or $1.80 most places I look.
One thing that’s been happening more recently, though, is a lot more variance among different brands. It used to be that Coke’s lineup and Pepsi’s lineup would be similarly priced and no matter what you got a bottle of you were paying about the same amount. The first big exception I remember to this was back when Mountain Dew had the Pitch Black flavor that sold abysmally. By the end there, the local convenience store on my way home in Deseret was selling those three for a dollar. It was tough to decide whether or not the price break was worth drinking that awful, awful drink. At first it was, but quickly became wasn’t.
Some of the local convenience stores have been selling the Pepsi Throwbacks at a significantly reduced price. Usually about $1 to $1.79 for the regular Pepsi and Mountain Dew. Unfortunately, I don’t like Pepsi of either variant from a bottle and I find the sugar Mountain Dew to be utterly inferior to the corn syrup stuff. The real steal right now for Mountain Dew fans is Vault. Vault would be Coke’s answer to the product. It’s not as good as Mountain Dew, but isn’t so bad and only costs a whopping 80 cents a bottle out here. I had initially assumed that the low pricing meant that Vault was being discontinued. Vault is Coke’s third try (that I am aware of) at unseating Mountain Dew, intermittently trying with Mello Yello and once a product called Surge.
But they keep making the stuff and selling the Vault stuff. Maybe they figure that if they can just get people to try it that they will realize that it tastes pretty good. Maybe they’re armed with blind taste tests giving them this idea. Honestly, I consider straight Mountain Dew and Vault to be comparable in quality, but I think Vault gets a grading curve because I don’t get it all that often and if I was stuck on a desert island there’s no doubt which I would prefer. What Coke needs to do next time around, if Vault doesn’t make it, is contract out the formula for Kroger’s Big K Citrus Drop product. That stuff is goooood. That it’s a house brand and cheaper is just icing on the cake. I would pay full price for it. This is in stark contrast to any of the other house brand options out there (Mountain Breeze, Mountain Lion, Mountain Lightning, etc…), most of which taste like flattened or watered down Mountain Dew.
We are actually pretty well stocked with soft drink cans. Outside of convenience stores, I’ve become a real bargain shopper for soft drinks at Safeway. They often have buy-two-get-two-free deals or buy-one-get-subsequent-cases-cheaper deals. So whenever they have those, I go crazy. They are encouraging you to buy as many as possible and I comply. It’s not like it’s going to waste. The result is that I keep some half-dozen flavors of stuff in the fridge. I used to try to avoid keeping anything more than one or two cans in the fridge for fear that I would just keep drinking, but I seem to have developed a natural stop-point where after I drink one I don’t want another one for a while. Sometimes I don’t want to drink a whole can at once. I’ve decided that given the cheapness and the fact that unhealthy food is no more wasted dumped into the sink than dumped into my mouth that I can poor out can remainders.
And on one last thing when it comes to soft drink prices, it is enormously irritating how cheap they make those 1-liter bottles. At the local truck stop, they’re only 10 cents more than a 20oz drink. Ten cents. What really had my head exploding was when they were cheaper. I was not as good then as I am now about just throwing away what I don’t want. So I would end up paying more to get less and would get quite irritated with that. Beyond which, those bottles are inconvenient on the whole due to their size. That’s less a factor for me now because I’m driving Clancy’s car which does not have cupholders able to accept a bottle of any size. I think it came out right before that was an absolute necessity.
One of the difficult decisions I had to make when going with Verizon is what phone to get. I have been a Windows Mobile user for quite some time. I really just stumbled upon it through chance and circumstance. But I quickly found out how it worked, found the software that I wanted to use for it, and never looked back. That’s not to say that I ever thought Windows Mobile was perfect. It was inconsistent and not ultra-intuitive. I had to install third-party applications for things that should have been native to the OS.
But when it comes to technology, I have a conservative soul and stick to what has always worked for me. I don’t like it when software-makers do massive revamps. They typically add features I like, but they change what I have always been delightfully accustomed to. And so it was with Windows Mobile. Windows Phone 7, WM6’s successor, is a massive revamp. None of the WM6 software will be compatible. Features I’ve come to rely on with WinMo will no longer be there, including multitasking and cut and paste. The unparalleled customizability of WM was explicitly dropped. In other words, they took half the reasons I will never own an iPhone and inserted it into their OS.
Because of this, I am left to find another OS. I didn’t think this would be that big of a deal as I thought of all of the things that I don’t like about Windows Mobile and thought that maybe Android, Symbian, or the Blackberry OS might not have these limitation. I was particularly interested in Symbian and Android, but it appears that Symbian is being gradually retired as well as its primary benefactor and owner, Nokia, starts looking for alternatives. It was looking at the alternatives that made me realize all that Windows Mobile could do and that I took for granted. I was relatively sure that I was going to migrate to Android for my next phone, but to my relative shock I discovered that Android can’t do a lot of things that Windows Mobile can do and has been able to do since at least 2003.
When it comes to smartphones, I have pretty specific needs. The biggest thing is what I call The Walkman Test. Basically, I want to be able to play music and videos without the device ever having to leave my pocket or holster. That means I need to reprogram the buttons both within the OS and within the media player. What I do now is set the volume buttons to open and start playing media. My main concern with Android is that it would not be able to do this. I was also concerned that, unlike with Windows Mobile, I might not be able to redirect all audio (and not just phone calls) to a Bluetooth phone headset. Any OS will let you use a Bluetooth stereo headset, but not necessarily pipe all audio to a headset designed mostly for phone use. Even Windows Mobile makes this a challenge.
I still don’t know the degree to which I can customize buttons on Android so that it can pass The Walkman Test. I asked some Android forums the question and got zero answers and a few “Why would anyone want to do that?” questions (which is usually a sign that it can’t). But I discovered along the way something more damning: Android can barely play my videos at all. I mean, it can play videos and there are tools to convert the videos into something that Android can play, but I don’t want to have to convert a video any time I want it to play on my phone. There are precisely two video players for Android that can play standard AVI files and both are crude and reports say that the video play is choppy (and one of them is in Chinese). This is in stark contrast to Windows Mobile, where there are at least two players that can play any type of video.
Perhaps more disconcerting is that the make-up of Android makes it so that it’s unlikely that any players will be coming out any time soon. I don’t know the technical details, but the folks from CorePlayer (the makers of both of the great Windows Mobile players) have said that they are trying but the Android OS is not at all conducive to third-party apps getting the kind of direct access to the hardware to smoothly play videos. I’m guessing that’s why the video on the players that do exist is so choppy. Android has to act as an intermediary of some sort and that bogs everything down. DivX, which also has a player for Windows Mobile, has flat-out announced that it is giving up on an Android player until Android changes its specs.
I have to believe that at some point Android will get it right. What I find fascinating is that I talk to Android users about this and they simply don’t understand why this is a problem. What’s so bad about converting videos? External video types can really drain the battery so it’s a good thing this option is not available to use (the same rationale that Apple defenders use for the complete lack of Flash support). Well, I’d like to make that decision for myself. I also get questions about why it’s such a big deal to have to pull the player out every time you want to stop or start a video. It makes me want to yell “Because this is what I want to do!” and I get agitated that everyone acts like it’s such an unreasonable request when Windows Mobile has been doing it for seven years.
I guess a lot of it just comes down to what someone wants from an OS. Which is what makes questions like “What is the best smartphone OS” ultimately dumb questions. I fail to see what the big deal is behind what the iPhone’s OS can do. I don’t understand how a sleek OS is worth not being able to install any application that Apple doesn’t want you to install (or having to go to war with your phone to do so). When people say “I love the iPhone because it can do x,” I am inclined to look at those people just as blankly as they look at me when I say that I like Windows Mobile because I can do y, which no other current OS can seem to do.”
Incidentally, I got a Windows Mobile phone and absolutely love it. It’s probably the last WM phone I will buy since it’s a dead platform. I am just hoping that Android can get its act together between now and then. Or maybe Windows Phone 7.1 (which, to its credit, will be able to play my video files right out of the box) will be a little less iPhoney. I’m feeling a little more anti-iPhone than usual. Not because the iPhone is a bad device, but because it was successful for all the wrong reasons. It demonstrated all of the things that a PDA OS can be successful without. And so Palm and Microsoft follow suit, throwing things like free-flowing software support out the window (no pun intended) and essentially dumbing the phones down. Making them easier to use, but making it harder to do anything outside the sandbox.
There’s one for sale on 1saleaday for $30. It’s a good little MP3 player. My only two complaints are that it doesn’t handle folders, (so you’d better have your MP3s tagged the way you want them) and it’s audio jack comes out of the bottom rather than the top. The battery life is extraordinary when in stand-by mode (and not bad otherwise). I lost mine for a few weeks and it still had 40% battery when I found it. In addition to the 4GB native drive, you can also stick an SDHC in there. Audio qualify is good, I think, though my hearing isn’t great. Oh, and don’t expect much out of the video. You have to convert everything to a bloated format to watch anything.
Via McArdle, this ad on Craigslist:
One very attractive male is offering his bedroom to an attractive female for the summer. No pressure or anything creepy. We can meet for drinks to discuss and make sure there’s mutual attraction.
I am fit, attractive, and under 30. Contact me for details, serious offer here.
No pressure, but mutual attraction required. Ooookay.
I think what’s particularly disconcerting – creepy – about this is not that he’s asking for sex in exchange for housing. Prostitution is nothing new, for sure. Rather, it’s the sort of passive-aggressive appeal. I mean passive-aggressive in the sense that it is passive and aggressive and not so much because it’s passive-aggressive in the snippy sort of way we think of the word. I mean, if he just came out and said what he was after, that would be one thing. Instead, he sort of wants to passively force it to happen. Of course, that’s one way to avoid going to jail for solicitation, I suppose. Whatever the utilitarian reasons for the tone of his appeal, it sort of feels like the guy that can’t quite ask the girl out and so keeps making “joking” comments to do so as indirectly as absolutely possible. Except that instead of avoiding the cops he would be trying to avoid rejection. Meanwhile, everyone in the room cringes every time he speaks.
I’ve mentioned on more than one occasion my frustration with AT&T’s new policy requiring smartphone users to have data plans. Though I am perfectly happy with my data plan and don’t look to downgrade anytime soon, I very much like the flexibility to do so and mostly just resent not having a choice in the matter.
Following up on a lead that I got a while back, I actually discovered a loophole. I can, in fact, use a smartphone without a data plan under certain circumstances. I tested it with my existing AT&T SIM card and it worked perfectly. No data plan was added.
AT&T adds the data plan when it registers a smartphone on its network. If it doesn’t register the smartphone, it can’t add a data plan. All of this made sense when a few Nokia smartphone users said that they were not affected by the policy change. AT&T does not offer Nokia smartphones (or, if it does, offers a very limited selection). So the thought occurred to me that perhaps if I got a Motorola Milestone (the GSM Droid) perhaps a data plan would not be added. The question is how extensive AT&T’s database is and how many kinds of phones it keeps track of.
As luck would have it, my new Verizon phone is a worldphone, which means that it is CDMA like all of Verizon’s phones, but it also has a SIM card slot. So I unlocked the phone, popped in my AT&T SIM card, and… no data plan added. It did not recognize the phone at all! This is despite the fact that it is the Verizon variant of a model that AT&T definitely offers. The difference between my Touch Pro 2 and AT&T’s Tilt 2 is one extra button and CDMA capability. That’s it. But that’s enough. All indications are that AT&T’s database is really quite limited.
The only question is whether or not I can add an appropriate data plan to it. Different phones have different options based on capability and it assumes that my phone is a dumb phone. However, it gives you the option to identify your phone. So theoretically, if I want to add a data plan I can simply tell the system it’s a Tilt 2. I suspect that if you tried to tell it a Tilt 2 was a dumb phone that it would figure out that you’re full of it. But I don’t think the reverse is true. And then, if I want to cancel my plan, I can go back and tell it that it’s a basement Motorola model or something. Maybe.
I haven’t figured everything out. It’s possible that my phone is an exception because of my specific account, but I don’t think so. It can’t add the data plan if it doesn’t recognize the phone. The second thing I am unsure of is if I ever identify it as a Tilt 2 whether or not I can then identify it as something else. I don’t see why not. As long as the phone itself isn’t correcting me, I think that AT&T is going to give me latitude.
All of this is something of a moot point since (a) I love my data plan, (b) AT&T is revising their data plan structure to allow for a cheaper low-bandwidth option, and (c) I’m with Verizon anyway. However, it’s something I am definitely going to keep in mind when/if AT&T makes its way to Callie. One of the reasons I got the phone I did was that I could take it back to AT&T (or Frontier Wireless) if I ever decided that I wanted to.
This was written a few weeks ago, though never sent. Mostly, I guess, I needed to blow off steam. Since then, I signed a two-year contract with Verizon making my doing business with AT&T in the future considerably less likely.
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Dear AT&T,
I have been a customer of AT&T Wireless and its predecessors for twelve years or so. I got a phone with a company called ColCall that became part of Cingular and when I was living in Deseret I was with Skyline Mobile, which was part of the AT&T network.
I have temporarily relocated to Callie, Arapaho, where you don’t yet provide coverage though you will soon be taking over the local Galaxy Mobile. When you had to cut off my data plan, I understood because it wasn’t fair to you to have to pay for the local towers while I get situated. So satisfied have I been with AT&T that I was going to bide my time with a local provider and switch to AT&T as soon as you arrived. Until recently, you have always done right by me.
However, late last year you enacted a policy requiring that smartphone users get a data plan. Until I got a data plan last year, I had always used my smartphone the same way that I used my PDA before it except with a phone attached so I have one less thing to remember before I head out the door. I did enjoy having the data plan while I had it, but I always appreciated the fact that if I needed to save money I could always go back to doing what I did before.
Though I guess I am currently grandfathered in, from what I understand I can never upgrade or replace my phone without signing up for a data plan that I am not sure I will need. This is a slap in the face from a company that I had come to expect more from and a company that I have defended and proselytized for in the face of some recent bad publicity. One of the things I have always appreciated about AT&T is that (unless I am under contract) my phone was my business. When Verizon told me that I could not have a data phone without a data plan regardless of contract, I told them I would just wait for AT&T (or until I relocated back into AT&T’s coverage area) because they would not do that.
You’ve made me eat those words and have made me question a lot of what I thought was the freedom of doing business with AT&T. My options in Callie while I am here are limited, so I’ll be honest and say that you may well retain my business. However, you have lost my loyalty.
Sincerely,
Will Truman
Callie, AO
A little while ago, the author of another blog (I can’t remember which one) commented on the irony that the company that initialized its name to get rid of the word “Fried” would be offering something like the Double Down. That left me scratching my head because I had thought that KFC had shortened its name not because of the word “Fried” but because of the word “Kentucky.” They were worried about it being considered too regionalized (which I considered silly, but there you go). Turns out that we were both right and we were both wrong.
He was right that the official reason they gave was the ford “Fried”. I was right because the real problem was indeed the word “Kentucky”. However, it wasn’t regionalization as I had though. Rather, it’s that the Commonwealth of Kentucky wanted a cut:
In 1990, the Commonwealth of Kentucky, mired in debt, took the unusual step of trademarking their name. Henceforth, anyone using the word “Kentucky” for business reasons – inside or outside the state – would have to obtain permission and pay a licening fee to the Commonwealth of Kentucky.
The result was that Kentucky Fried Chicken became KFC and more:
Kentucky Fried Chicken were not the only ones who bravely refused to knuckle under. The name of the most famous horse race in North America, held every year at Churchill Downs, was changed from the “Kentucky Derby” to “The Run for the Roses” for similar reasons; many seed and nursery outfits that had previously offered Kentucky Bluegrass switched to a product known as “Shenendoah Bluegrass” instead; and Neil Diamond’s song “Kentucky Woman” was dropped from the radio playlists at his request, as the licensing fees he was obligated to pay the Commonwealth of Kentucky exceeded the performance royalties he was receiving for the airplay.
I’ve often wondered if states were allowed to do this. I was actually thinking less of the state’s name and more the state’s flag. I figured that they could because state-run universities trademark their name and logo. I began to wonder if the current copyright mentality had been in place at the founding it the use of the stars and stripes would require paying a royalty to the government.
Memo to Mozilla,
It’s great that you’re doing all of this legwork about how to improve Firefox. I have an alternate proposal: before worrying about improving, fix whatever the heck is wrong with it! It’s finally reached the point that I can barely recommend Firefox to anyone anymore. It’s not like it used to be with few other options. Internet Explorer has suddenly become a pretty good browser. Google Chrome is pretty cool, too, and is expanding it’s plug-ins at a pretty rapid clip. Meanwhile, it’s gotten to the point that if my computer has stopped responding with reasonable diligence, closing Firefox is the first thing I do and it fixes the problem 90% of the time. Even right now, with only 14 tabs open and a window I opened just a few hours ago (and no instances of Adobe Flash open), you are taking up 65% of my CPU usage and nearly a gigabyte of RAM. I know I type fast, but I do not type that fast. This is unacceptable. It did not used to be this way.
—-
Memo to Plantronics,
Your Explorer 330 Bluetooth headset is the best Bluetooth headset the market has seen before or sense. Why, oh, why, did you stop making it?
—-
Memo to Verizon,
Just because I am now your customer does not mean I have decided to stop hating you.
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Memo to Garmin GPS Maker,
I wish you would allow me to set View Map as a default. Instead, you put up a screen asking if I want to View Map or Find Route. It’s a fair question. Sometimes I do want to Find Route and other times I just want to View Map. However, if I want to Find Route I can hit the screen an extra time to get to that menu. Really. I can. It’s not likely to create any greater a safety risk because if I am going to find a route I am going to be focused on the GPS anyway. Anyway, while sometimes I want to Find Route and sometimes I want to View Map, I never want the device to simply ask the question indefinitely. At the very least, switch to the map after two minutes of no response. Or add a feature for it to turn off. Cause sometimes I don’t want to use the GPS, and sometimes I want to Find Route, and sometimes I want to View Map, but I repeat I never want that question just sitting there indefinitely.
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Memo to Bloggers and Website Administrators,
Unless you’re actually updating your blog every five minute, you do not need the blog to refresh every five minutes. I can hit F5 for myself.
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Memo to Electronics Makers Everywhere
Stop the LED abuse! Do not underestimate the power of LED! The power splitter for my car has an LED that lights up the entire car at night. My old Pocket PC docking station had an LED so powerful I had to place black electrical tape over it and it’s still distracting.