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Posts from the “Rants” Category

March 4, 2013 4 Comments

Cell Phone Service Pricing

I think I want to start an electrical utility. After researching pricing plans, I like the following:

  • Pre-paid, flat-rate pricing, say $199.95 per month for 1,500 kWh of home electricity usage. If you exceed the monthly allotment you pay an additional $0.99 per kWh.1
  • $0.30 to recharge a AA battery. If you recharge a lot of AA batteries you can pay $9.95 per month for unlimited AA battery charging. Other sizes of batteries will have different rates.
  • $9.95 per month to connect a work laptop to your home electricity service.
  • $9.95 per month to use an extension cord to “tether” other devices to your home electricity service.

You may wonder why I would propose such a complicated pricing plan.2 Clearly, you don’t understand these charges are necessary to cover the costs of maintaining and upgrading the electricity infrastructure.

It makes total sense to me.3 After all, I just paid my cell phone bill.

1Maybe those who sign up first will get unlimited electricity per month and will be able to keep their plan as long as they don’t move. How about carryover-kWh’s? Or neighborhood plans where neighbors share kWh’s?
2You might note that it (1) has many customers bearing the cost for the few who use the most electricity, (2) doesn’t encourage conservation, (3) charges differently for different uses of the same electricity, and (4) has outrageously different pricing with no relationship to how much electricity is used.
3Most important, let’s not just charge by the kWh.
November 19, 2012 2 Comments

Doesn’t FB realize that is far easier for a user to opt-out of a feed by unliking a brand/person/page that has done a poor job of communication than it is to mess with all the account settings or for them to try to tweak their algorithm all the time to try to guess what people want?

Mark Cuban

Apparently not. :-(

November 6, 2012

Obama is funding al quaida they are in the employ of the CIA benghazi was preplanned murderr in the first Obama is going to be in for atleast 3 more terms and will be another charismatic Hitler whom people will virtually worship as god all before he is wiped from the book of life and fed flames for he is worthy he is full throttle gay ,communist Muslim and devil possessed that’s why he is so greatly admired ‘ no greater deception can come upon human minds……..’

During election season we get to see the political opinions of our friends and our friends’ friends on Facebook. The quote above falls into the latter class.

I chose this rant because I can’t tell whether it is terribly misguided or brilliant parody.

And that’s sad…

Update. Upon further investigation, I’ve determined that it’s terribly misguided opinion. And that’s even more sad.

Yeah, I should have put [sic] all the way through the quote. Just realize that I just cut and pasted it from Facebook. All spellings, capitalizations, spacings, and punctuations are as originally posted (other than I changed the internal quote marks from double quotes to single to fit within the context).