At approximately 6am on Tuesday of this week, I got a terse text message from AT&T:

YOUR OFF-NETWORK DATA USAGE IS IN VIOLATION OF YOUR SERVICE CONTRACT. CALL [phone number] FOR DETAILS.

I also noticed that my phone was listing “Off Network” a couple places on the screen where it usually said “AT&T.” I hadn’t noticed that before. I assumed that I was still within AT&T’s network because I knew that they had serviced around Callie and the phone had given me no indication that I was not in an AT&T area. Had I been missing the words “Off Network” this entire time? One of the downsides to having my detail-attention problem is that I never know these things for sure.

I called AT&T when I got out of bed a couple hours later and sure enough I was outside AT&T’s range. This meant that AT&T was having to pay someone else for the use of their tower. This was costing AT&T money and AT&T did not like this very much. If I continued to do this, there would be a series of repercussions and none of them good. None of them logical, either. First, they would start charging me for off-network use. Then if I didn’t stop they would cut my off-network use. Then if it did not stop they would cut off my data plan and then my cell phone altogether. Then if it did not stop, they would cut off my entire family’s cell phone plan (my family shares a plan – I have a Colosse number).

The first step is in itself curious. If AT&T starts charging me for off network use, then are they still losing money on me? Seems to me that they could charge the same amount that they’re losing to whoever’s towers they’re using. Or they could do what companies like AT&T often do and charge more and make a little profit off the deal. The charge is 5 cents a kilobyte. Are the local towers really charging them more than that?! Then, if they proceed with the next step, which is to prevent me from using data for any off network at all, the rest is rendered moot. Because at that point, it has to stop.

The next thing he said was equally bizarre. He said that the problem was that my usage was over 40% off network and that was the problem. So it wasn’t the amount of off network use I was doing, but rather the portion. So then, theoretically, if I go up to Tupelo (where AT&T has coverage) and use up a whole bunch of bandwidth, I could bring that average back down. The easiest way out for me then would be to clog up their data streams needlessly. That I could do.

What appears to be the case, however, is that the guy I was talking to was talking out of his hat. While the portion may have been an issue, the number is not 40% (which is really quite generous) but 20% (which is about what I would expect it to be). But mostly, there is a kilobyte limit that I was not only exceeding, but smashing like a pinata. No amount of data usage in Tupelo would have made up for that. So at that point, my only option was to cancel my data coverage on AT&T. Further, given that I am presently out of AT&T’s service area, it probably won’t be long before they discover where my phone calls are being made out of.

I’ve been a loyal AT&T customer since I was 17. It wasn’t AT&T at that point, but it was a company bought by a company that merged with a couple other companies that bought AT&T. And I technically wasn’t with AT&T in Deseret, but was with an affiliate that was on AT&T’s network. But then I got on the folks’ plan and have been with AT&T since. The only problem I’ve ever really had with the company was actually with Deseret Mobile, the affiliate, who were not up front with me about the price spike that came with a new phone I had purchased and, despite the existence of a 7 day no-questions-asked return policy, would not let me get back on my old plan.

As it happens, I may not be away from AT&T for very long. It appears that they are moving into the area by the end of the year as long as the FTC does not step in. Of course, this is a bit frustrating because all of this could have been avoided if they had just done so a year ago. Now I’m going to have to figure out what to do between now and when they arrive or elsewise decide what other carrier to go with.

I’m tempted to tell AT&T where they could stick it with their illogical threats, but I am inclined to think that was mostly just the guy I was talking to. The fact that he got the 20%/40% wrong tells me that he wasn’t reading from some threatening script. Besideswich, whoever made this happen more than made up for it.

Spiritual women are more promiscuous than are non-spiritual women. The study differentiated between “spiritual” and “religious” and though the article focuses on spirituality, the pecking order seems to be spiritual over non-spiritual, irreligious over religious. Their theory:

“Believing one is intimately tied to other human beings and that interconnectedness and harmony are indispensible may lead one to believe sexual intimacy possesses a divine or transcendent quality in itself,” Burris writes. “In fact, ascribing sacred qualities to sex has been positively associated with positive affective reactions to sex, frequency of sex, and number of sexual partners among university students.”

Sounds blissful.

I have an alternative theory.

Being an atheist is undemanding but also unpopular and for a lot of people unfulfilling. Being a member of an organized religious provides you with a packaged set of beliefs but comes with a bunch of rules you have to follow. Call yourself “spiritual” and not “religious” and you can do whatever the heck you want with less in the way of social consequences and you can find meaning in whatever the heck you want to find meaning in. So if it feels good you can make it not about feeling good but about connectedness and all that jazz. The rules are typically more generous when you make them up as you go along. You get gratification from all ends.

That these people would correlate highly with people that engage in promiscuous, unprotected sex is hardly a surprise.

A friend emailed me this article, calling it the “stupidest tax ever” and laments that it won’t be long before we’re doing that over here. But… don’t we already do that here? I seem to recall a big to-do a decade or so ago when fast food restaurants and the like all shifted from the radio to song collections. More recently, many are using satellite radio (which has fees of its own).

It does bring to light… what obligations should establishments have towards the playing of other people’s music? In some cases, like Burger King, it would seem that the obligation should be minimal. The contribution that the music plays to the atmosphere is minimal. This is particularly true if you’re dealing with the radio, wherein they don’t even get to control what music is being played except by station. Further, the royalties are already being paid, in a sense, by the advertisers whose ads were playing at the fast food joint. I would actually say that a willingness to play the radio, with commercials and all, is about as clear-cut an indicator as you’re going to get that they’re not making any money off the music.

A more middling example, though, would be Starbucks. Starbucks puts a much strong emphasis on atmosphere and that includes certain types of music over other music and also excludes the radio. People aren’t paying $4 for coffee to listen to listen to Crazy Sam sell cars at craaaaazy prices. Since their using the atmosphere to get people to buy overpaid coffee and that atmosphere involves music, it does not seem wholly unreasonable to me that the artists that are making them money on a regular basis get paid more than the $1 MP3 download.

A while back I twittered an article from the St Cloud Times that they have since taken offline. It deal with various venues ceasing to play live music because royalty-seekers were asking for a monthly fee lest they get slammed if one of their singers covers a song in their stable without permission. Such fees are typically paid by actual live music venues. It seems right to me that live music venues should pay for people that write the music that they’re paying people to perform. It gets uncomfortable in cases where live music is an occasional throw-in but not a central part of the business model. Rights-holders can easily make the counterpoint that if it’s not that important then they should be willing to do away with it. According to the article, some places are doing just that because while it may be bringing mild enjoyment to the coffee shop’s or sandwich shop’s clientele as well as the unpaid singers enjoying getting a stage, it’s not really bringing in money. This does not strike me as a situation where anyone wins.

The other issue in all of this is that while there are some good arguments that establishments should pay, the entire pay structure kind of smells. It’s not like somebody that does a Billy Joel or Benny Wobczek cover or the venue that makes money by having a guy play a Billy Joel or Benny Wobczek song on stage results in Billy Joel or Benny Wobczek getting paid for the use of the song he wrote. Instead, it is part of a monthly fee that goes to his royalty collection agency. They then decide how to dispense the money, using some sort of formula that basically makes sure that the Billy Joels get paid whether the songs are Billy Joel songs of Benny Wobczek (a name I made up) ones. In other words, it’s a system designed to assure that those that need it the least get the most. And honestly that’s going to be fair a good deal of the time, but when it comes to sandwich shops failing to play music so that Billy Joel can get just a little more coin… well, that’s just not something I’m excited about.

Of course, what’s the alternative? The alternative is to keep a catalog of what is being played. This is most easily done when people buy collections. I would guess that Starbucks probably pays its artists in accordance with how frequently their art is played (and the songwriters get paid in kind). With Satellite radio, it’s a big more tricky. Satellite radio has to pay the songwriters for the music they play, but I think they, too, pay ASCAP and the like in lump sums. However, they also have playlists that ASCAP can use to distribute the pay fairly. Anyhow, the places that play satellite radio let XM/Sirius take care of that for them. With live venues, though, there is far less accountability. While I’ve heard that it used to be that they paid something like 12-cents a song, the SCT article and what I’ve heard more recently is that it’s more the Joel/Wobczek lump sum arrangement. Absent a radio playlist, though, the degree of accounting and accountability required would be cost-prohibitive. A couple years ago, the rules for Internet Radio changed from lump sums to a song-by-song fee and the internet stations cried bloody murder because it made profitability that much harder.

What frustrates me more than a little about this is that here we have an industry where the number of people trying to break into it far exceeds the number of slots available. For every Billy Joel that has made it, there are ten Benny Wobczeks that would love for people to cover their songs with attribution and would consider it free advertising. The same goes for the radio. The radio has to pay songwriters and such to play their music… but there is also a long history of the record labels having to pay radio stations to play their music. Nowhere in this process is the realistic ability of songwriters to say “Hey, play my song. Hopefully that will get people to buy the CD which I will ge ta royalty from” or artists to say “Hopefully that will ge tpeople to come to my shows.” In other words, the system treats the Billy Joel’s and Benny Wobczeks the same which puts the latter at a competitive disadvantage.

The Creative Commons attempted to account for this sort of mismatching by giving people a host of royalty-free art that they can use under specific rules. So it’s not like it hasn’t been tried. But this gets down to the guts of the problem, which is that people are really not very adventurous when it comes to music. We prize the familiar. By doing so, we give all of the leverage to the big record labels and radio conglomerates and royalty collection agencies who can basically set our musical menu both in terms of content and price. If anything else is to change, that would have to change first. I’m not holding my breath.

It’s kind of a long story, but starting right now I do not have any Internet access outside of the library and a couple of hotspots in town. Though I still have an unlimited data plan on my cell phone (for the moment), I run the risk of jeopardizing my entire family’s AT&T account if I continue to use it. So… my participation will be on the sporadic side until Friday. More details to come.

Europe is moving to prevent customers from getting a shock with their mobile bill. People do a moderate amount of surfing and suddenly find themselves with whopping bills. As some of you may recall, AT&T did me a solid by waving a hefty data charge if I signed up for the data plan. It’s better when things can be solved this way rather than through legislation, though I don’t find this law objectionable in spirit. I particularly like that people are allowed to set their own limits.

File this away under “things that should have been thought about at some point before or immediately following getting on this road.”

A fascinating article from The New Scientist about the “Women and children first” ethos. Apparently, whether these cultural norms are honored can depend on whether the ship sinks fast or slow. Of course, this looks at older cases. No telling how that would work out today.

Could the cure to peanut allergies be to feed them peanuts earlier?

I read things like this and come away amazed that the early innovators didn’t patent the mouse and other obvious things.

A list of ideas on what we can do about the airline seat problem, discussed here on HC previously. Numbers 6 and 7 sound familiar. Meanwhile, Continental Airlines is joining many others in charging more for front and exit-row seats. On the one hand, getting those seats has been a godsend and thanks to Clancy’s diligence we’ve been able to do so without paying more and that’s coming to an end. So… boo. On the other hand, I said during that previous conversation that I would be willing to pay more for more space.

Another Slate article on the precarious anonymity of sperm donors. If the idea is “the best interest of the child” and children not conceived and not born do not count, it’s difficult to argue that anonymity should remain in tact for the convenience of the father and so that sperm would be widely available for women that want to conceive solo (or have infertile husbands). Even so, this falls under limitations on the best interest of the child in my view.

Jones Soda is a Hit Coffee favorite, at least among Web and I (I have no idea of Sheila’s opinion on this important matter) and apparently they’ve sold out. In the literal sense, I mean. They’d been bought out by a competitor.

(On a sidenote, Jones soda is owned by a guy named Jones and Reed, the purchasing company, is owned by a guy named Reed. You don’t expect to see that a whole lot these days.)

Jones had actually been, up to a point, pretty successful until recently. Unfortunately, they leveraged at the wrong time to expand into candies and wider distribution and had fallen onto hard times. Reed bought them for a song.

Web expressed some concern that this will mean the end of one of the few major options for those that prefer sugar to corn syrup. This does not appear to be the case, fortunately for sugar-lovers (or is that corn syrup haters?) as Reed is apparently all natural-oriented. That type of thing could mean corn syrup (it’s natural, so how can it be bad for you, corn producers ask) but more likely means, as my former roommate Dennis put it, that the flavors will now come with Ginsung included or somesuch jazz.

I don’t care if they include Ginsung or not nor do I care if they go with corn syrup. What I love(d) most about Jones Soda is their innovative array of flavors and their creative packaging.

If Reed goes messing with the flavor selection, that will be the biggest bummer since Jolt Cola stopped their flavored line. Most of you that know of Jolt know it for being super-duper caffeine-infused. But for a while when I was in college, they had a line of different flavored drinks that was really good. The only two things that compare to it are the current Mountain Dew offerings, which are seasonal and inconsistent, and Jones.

I was introduced to Jones and irregular Jolt back when I was in college and both quickly eclipsed Coke and Pepsi. Sortly after, Southern Tech University signed an exclusive deal with Coca-Cola that prevented them from selling Jones on campus. So I would have to go across the Interstate to the scary part of town to get my fix. That was where I discovered Jolt. They made a great combination: Jolt if I wanted something caffeinated and Jones if I didn’t. I would bring some back to my roommates (Dennis, Saresh, and Hubert at the time) and they liked it, too (except maybe Saresh).

Then we moved on, I moved off campus, and Jolt fell off my radar and a year or so it disappeared.

Jones, too, had fallen somewhat off my radar until I moved to the northwest. Jones Soda is apparently based out of the Pacific Northwestern United States. I did not know this. I did know that Jones was more widely available out there than anywhere else I’d been, but for some reason I thought that Jones was a Canadian company. But anyway, I guess due to regional preference, it was more widely available and so I got it when I could.

Interestingly, one of the airlines I flew also offered Jones in lieu of Coke or Pepsi. I was honestly kind of disappointed. It was somewhere below Coke and above Pepsi. The fact that they used sugar rather than corn syrup didn’t seem to make much of any difference.

Pepsi has been on a sugar kick lately with a “Throwback” line made from sugar instead of corn syrup. Clint swears it tastes sweeter, but honestly I can’t really taste it. It does taste a little bit different, but mostly different and not better or worse.

The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if somebody at Pepsi had just gotten tired of people ragging on corn syrup and decided to give people what they wanted just so that they would shut up and that most people would come to the conclusion that I did. So then even if Throwback was a failure, they’d have something to point to and say “See? Nobody cares!”

Of course, it’s also possible (my experience with Jones aside) that to get the full taste of sugar they would need to do some R&D work and revise the formula built around corn syrup. Or maybe they did do some R&D work to bring the cost down and the lack of awesomeness that I sense is a matter of corners cut elsewhere.

On one last note about Jones Soda, the second thing I mentioned was the creative packaging. Jones takes submitted photographs and puts them on the bottles, which is neat. They also let you order custom bottles with your own pictures. I had this idea that one of these days I would take the comic book characters I created in high school and give each one of them a Jones flavor. If I want to do that, I might should get a move on while before Reed decides that’s a corner that can be cut.

One of my pet peeves is the utter demonization of television. Not that I believe that TV is a great thing or that I don’t believe that a lot of people spend way too much time watching it, but I do believe that it is often held to a different standard due to the (erroneous) belief that it is inherently worthless as anything but a time-killer.

One of the areas I have long been skeptical of is the correlation between TV-watching and obesity. It’s not that I don’t believe that such a correlation exists. Rather, I believe that the correlation is greatly exaggerated by confounding factors. Namely, I think that parents that fail to monitor their kids’ TV intake are also likely to fail to monitor their calorie intake. Conscientious parents that reduce or eliminate television watching are also likely to reduce or eliminate junk food. You get the idea. Again, that’s not to say that such is responsible for all of the difference, but I do (or did) think that gets lost in the fervor to prove one’s cultural and intellectual superiority by demonizing television.

According to a new study, though, there may be more to the story than that. It seems that the watching of television in itself may not be the issue. It may be the commercials. For those parents that let their kids watch a lot of TV without commercials – either public programming or videos – there is no predictive value when it comes to obesity. But when you throw commercials in there, you start to see it. This remained true even after they worked to control for the other contributing factors that immediately come to mind.

The biggest thing I’m not sure about in the article is that the culprit is that I think they are overestimating the effectiveness of the advertising. Don’t get me wrong, advertising is important. Particularly when it comes to brand identification. But when it comes to kids’ time horizons and their inability to shop for themselves, I think that there is something else at work here. I mean, I don’t envision kids saying “Ooooh, an ad for Doritos! I will ask Mom for Doritos right now and she will get some next time she is out and then I will love it!”

Rather, what I think happens is that kids see an ad for Doritos and say “Mmmh. Hungry. What’s in the pantry?” and if it happens to be Doritos then they have Doritos but otherwise they have whatever is on hand. We very rarely had any name brand stuff that advertised on TV when I was growing up, but I doubt that made me immune from the commercials. Add on to this the fact that the times in which the commercials are showing are perfect times to get food and it helps generate bad habits. Doritos commercial. Hunger. Rustling through cabinet. Eating store-brand Lays knock-offs in time for the show to come back on. That sort of thing.

The government solution to this, if we are looking for one, is to ban food ads during childhood programming. I don’t see that having a whole lot of effect, though, because (a) kids spend time watching more general programming, too, and you still have the bite-size interruptions that just invite people of all ages to go up and grab a bite to eat. To be fair, though, they seemed to at least attempt to control for (b).

From a parenting standpoint, this could be more helpful. It could, if more widely understood, lead to false distinctions about which kinds of sedentary activities are superior to which other sedentary activities. A week ago, I would have said that it doesn’t do a whole lot of good to limit their intake if they just make a beeline to the computer room. But if the study isn’t missing something significant it looks like some of the alternatives to commercial television, including commercial-free television, may actually not be nearly so bad as previously supposed.

It could, of course, be missing something significant. Some of my same concerns about studies that link television watching with obesity could also skew the results of this one. Namely, there’s more than one breed of parent and even though it does trend along SES lines, it’s difficult to impossible to really control for parenting styles. So the subset of parents that let their kids watch television but are conscientious enough about it that the kids don’t end up watching commercials could be curbing the potential obesity with diet-monitoring. So it could demonstrate that it’s less about whether the children watch commercials or not and more about whether the parents are conscientious about what they’re watching (ie PBS and selected videos) can allow their children to watch more television without negative results. That in and of itself is an interesting thought.

Whether it’s commercials or some other factor, though, I much prefer deeper thought than “Kids are fat because they watch too much TV!” as if spending hours on the computer or even reading a book would be better. There are all manner of confounding factors that can be contributing to it. Something as complicated as obesity tends to have numerous causes and what might be the cause for one person left another entirely unscathed. That being said, I am also very wary of people that say “CORRELATION DOES NOT MAKE CAUSATION!” and act as though that ends the discussion. Correlation may not be causation, but it’s still significant. I may be suspicious of the studies that link two hours of television a day to obesity, but it’s still significant and ought to make parents more conscientious about the viewing habits of their youngsters.

A few years ago, when we were living in Deseret, we were visiting its capital where there was a guy talking about… well, I can’t remember what now but I heard every word. He was very loud. Someone at another table commented, also with a voice loud enough that I could hear, “You know, there’s one at every table.” I laughed, they saw me, our tables acknowledged each other, and we all collectively rolled our eyes at the really, really loud guy at the other table. Ever since then, “There’s one at every table” has become a staple of the sort of long-term couple private dialogue that occurs between Clancy and I.

Clancy and I were eating out at a restaurant on our move out here to Arapaho when there was one at the booth behind us. It was a guy talking about… well, everything. He was talking disapprovingly about sluts and waxing philosophical about the failures of his generation and the poor prospects of marriage out there because of all of the sluts. To be fair, he was disapproving of guys that sleep around a lot, too, though I don’t remember what word, if any, he used to describe them.

He was sitting at the booth behind Clancy and was alone with a young woman. He looked to be somewhere in his early-to-mid thirties. He apparently dated a girl for quite a while. One night, she went to a party that he didn’t go to because he had to work and the next day she broke up with him. He thinks that she had perhaps been unfaithful. He thought she was a promiscuous sort – or at least had taken a step in that direction while he was working. That seemed to be his defining story. He talked about her alot.

The young woman was more attractive than he was. She wasn’t stunning, but looked like of like Aubrey Plaza with less even skin. He was a stocky – but not fat – fellow. But he was kind of funny looking. Sort of like his face was put together by an 8 year old on one of those rudimentary face making applications on the web. His nose was a little too big. His eyes were a touch too close together. Something… off. Not ugly, just… ah, well, the words escape me.

And there was something about how his story, and the way he told it, and the way he looked, and the way he looked while telling it, all failed to match up quite right. It sort of felt like the guy was trying to invent a personality and was failing. It was impossible to tell whether he was on a date with the Aubreyesque young woman or whether it was just a dinner out between friends, but he seemed to be putting on a show of sorts. Either trying to get a date or a second one. In a Michael Scott sort of way, he struck me as a guy with a certain, sad darkness in him trying like hell to compensate and just be… normal. Not even spectacular. Just normal. Well, sometimes to be impressive and sometimes to be normal. You get the feeling that at first he wants to be accepted but then the second he is, he wants to be admired.

She got maybe 100 words in all night. The conversation was completely and entirely about him. Not just his previously failed relationship, which itself took up half the conversation, but about his thoughts of sluts, sexual promiscuity, marriage, and so on.

After we left, Clancy and I speculated as to whether it was a date or not. She said it sure came across to her like one and I couldn’t disagree. I said that if it was a first date, though, it was one of the worst performances I’ve ever seen. I then cited that in addition to being something of a bore, he also completely overlooked the cardinal rule about never dominating the conversation too much or talking too much about yourself on the first date. She and I related some of our experiences. I talked about a couple of opportunities that I really fouled up. She told me about a couple of dates that couldn’t end soon enough for her.

She also told me about several years ago with this one guy she’d recently met that drove her to Pontchartrain once who wouldn’t stop talking the entire way and how she thought, “Gosh, this guy sure talks a lot.” Thankfully, she said, it didn’t stop her from eventually marrying the guy.

Pittsburgh Steelers QB Ben Roethlisberger is in talks with Georgia police about a sexual assault allegation. This is hardly the first time that a professional athlete is accused of such a thing. People tend to line up according to their loyalties and ideologies whenever it happens. Fans of the athlete in question, those that believe that fake accusations of rape are commonplace, and often men more generally assume that until proven otherwise any sex that occurred was probably consensual and the woman is looking for cash or publicity. Women’s groups, rape victims, and often women more generally assume a degree of validity to the charges.

What’s interesting about Roethlisberger is that this is actually the second allegation against him. Part of me thinks that if you’re accused once, it’s possible that you just slept with the wrong person. If you’re accused twice? That represents a much greater likelihood of a control problem or a sense of sexual entitlement or, more simply put, a rapist. On the other hand, there’s a reason that the prosecution is prevented from bringing forth prior accusations and convictions to trial. It can create an unfair prejudice. Further, a woman that is aware of Roethlisberger’s first accusation knows that she will have a lot more credibility than if she goes and accuses Eli Manning. Back on the first hand, if you’re the type of person that sleeps with a professional athlete then makes accusations, you don’t really get to choose the athlete. If she’s that type of person, it is possible but strains credibility a bit that the pieces would fall into place for such a move.

Also noteworthy is that Roethlisberger has a reputation for control issues outside the bedroom. He is known for tempting fate by engaging in risky and possibly injury-inducing behavior. Besides the allegations and his performances as a QB, he’s known for a motorcycle incident wherein he wasn’t wearing a helmet and a bowling accident shortly before a playoff game.

None of this is to say that he’s necessarily a rapist (or sexual assaulter). But he’s going to have a hard time finding a jury that is unaware of at least the previous sexual harassment accusation. He’s only 28 and should have a long career ahead of him. At the rate he’s going, by misdeeds or misfortune, it’s at pretty substantial risk.