YRU screwN me?

Got an unlimited text message plan for your cell phone?  Good for you, since the prices are rising.

Senator Herb Kohl, Democrat of Wisconsin and the chairman of the Senate antitrust subcommittee, wanted to look behind the curtain. He was curious about the doubling of prices for text messages charged by the major American carriers from 2005 to 2008, during a time when the industry consolidated from six major companies to four. [emphasis mine]

And why not?  Texting volume has increased exponentially.  But the cost doesn't.  In fact, the bandwidth for text messages costs nothing - it's always been there.

text messages are not just tiny; they are also free riders, tucked into what’s called a control channel, space reserved for operation of the wireless network. That’s why a message is so limited in length: it must not exceed the length of the message used for internal communication between tower and handset to set up a call. The channel uses space whether or not a text message is inserted. 

In other words, we're getting screwed.  With cell phone companies, that's no surprise.

Capitalism's quote of the day

A financial writer was trying to track down the source of the financial crisis, from greedy loan marketers to failures at rating agencies overseeing complex "collateralized debt obligations" (CDOs), and heard this from a hedge fund manager that had seen the problems early:

[Eisman, hedge fund manager]: ‘Where are the rating agencies in all of this? And I’d always get the same reaction. It was a smirk.’ He called Standard & Poor’s and asked what would happen to default rates if real estate prices fell. The man at S.& P. couldn’t say; its model for home prices had no ability to accept a negative number. ‘They were just assuming home prices would keep going up,’ Eisman says.” [emphasis mine]

These are the guardians of our markets.  

Why David Brooks is a tool

I've never liked the guy, because he pretends to be a moderate but likes to pound on individual responsibility to the complete exclusion of cultural forces from corporations to consumerism.  This guy agrees, and he completely and thoroughly lays out the case why David Brooks is a tool.

A sample:

Brooks lies about how the [mortgage crisis and credit crisis] devastation occurred. An "unspoken code has been silently eroded, he reveals. Silently, David? Marketers of all kinds have spent billions for 40 years telling Americans they deserve a break today and that marketers from McDonald's and credit-card companies to mortgage lenders will give it to them instantly. This has been the most monumental, unrelenting campaign to destroy a culture the world has seen, barring perhaps the fascist and communist propaganda juggernauts of the 1930s. Our own governments are in on it, not just via de-regulation but with lotteries.

Things that make me pissed #6

Pity-me item-wanted Craigslist cheapskates

This guy wants an Airport Express 802.11n wifi base station. He wants it for $35 (instead of the $180 retail price) because:

"I'm looking for this for some one (sic) else. He's out of work and can't afford much."

Cry me a river. If you are out of work, you don't need a $200 router. You need a job.


P.S. What is it about June and things that piss me off? All previous pissed list items were posted in June 2007...