A GThing Science Project

It's math time again now that Verizon has announced their new data plans. For $30/mo you can enjoy a hefty 2GB of download. That's not a per-day rate - that's for the whole month. Sixty Six paltry megabytes per day in exchange for your hard earned cash.

How much does their data cost add to the services you are likely to be using?

First - and .mp3 file. Let's say you buy a 4MB MP3 from Amazon for $.99. Downloading it is going to cost you 1/5 of 1% of your monthly cap with works out to about 6 cents. So your MP3 is costing you a total of $1.05 - on par for sales tax in most places.

What about a large game? A heavyweight will weigh in at about 300MB and will cost you around $5. You'd use about 15% of your data cap to download it which will cost you about $4.50, almost doubling the cost of the game to $9.50.

Netflix has rolled out support for both iOS and Android and is going to be the thing that eats up a lot of your bandwidth. Netflix eats up about 1GB per hour, so a two hour movie will exhaust your entire available bandwidth for the month. If you're on the cheap streaming plan for $8 a month, that movie just cost you $38 to stream. Looks like DVDs are running about $10 on Amazon these days, so you've roughly quadrupled the cost to watch a movie once as opposed to actually owning it.

At Verizon's full advertised speed of 12Mbps, it would take just over 22 minutes to exhaust your entire monthly bandwidth cap. What's the point of offering 4G if you don't offer data usage caps to at least approach matching the speeds?

Most mobile users don't actually hit the 2GB limit (based off my own experience and Verizon's claims), but the amount of data used is rising quickly. The problem with Verizon's low 2GB cap is not that it won't satisfy your needs right now, it's that it won't satisfy your needs very soon, and Verizon has no mechanism in place for their caps to adjust so they only effect the heaviest users.

By setting low usage caps, Verizon is limiting the possibilities for future innovation on mobile platforms. It's very unlikely that a high-bandwidth service like Netflix would be born and flourish on Verizon's network. Their policy is anti-innovation and anti-consumer. The average user can already see regular 2GB usage on the horizon.

Developers want to build trampolines and Verizon wants to build very low ceilings.

Currently the only carrier to offer an unlimited data plan is Sprint. Their plan costs the same as Verizon's 2GB plan.

Sit back, relax, and allow me to regale you with a tale of woe, action, love found, love lost, international intrigue, and mystery. I warn you, reader, this story is not for the faint of heart or the weak of bowel.

The players:

USAA: A top level government financial agency serving the armed forces with all their needs, battling on the front lines of the banking industry to make sure your checks are processed, your ATM card is functional, and all your international bank accounts are on the up and up. Also my bank. USAA is the hero of this story ... or are they?

US Bank: A shady counter-intelligence agency working for shadow governments to introduce chaos into world markets and bring about the dark purposes of the Pentavirate (currently made up of The Queen, the Vatican, the Gettys, the Rothschilds, and Colonel Sanders before he went tits-up).

[redacted] property management company: The property management company for my apartment.

Me: Awesome ... or am I?

Here are the facts:

On April 11, 2011 I signed a lease with [redacted] for a new apartment in downtown Salt Lake City (the exciting and seedy underbelly of Utah). In order to sign the lease I had to provide certified funds in the amount of $1652.00 in order to cover my first month's rent, my deposit, and other charges and fees. For the purposes of making this story far more interesting, let's round it up to $20 billion dollars.

USAA's elite secret underground headquarters in located somewhere in the part of Texas that doesn't show up on maps. Unfortunately all of their black helicopters were away on other important fiscal missions and their super-secret nationwide network of pneumatic tubes was undergoing maintenance, forcing them to rely on the United States Postal Service for delivery of cashier's checks and other high-level government documents. This meant a 3-5 day delay in receiving said certified funds, the possible forfeiture of my newly acquired apartment, and an inconvenience for my sense of impatience. Plus, US postal workers don't carry briefcases that are handcuffed to their arms.

I walked into US bank to attempt a cash advance on my card for the $20 billion dollars. With the cash advance, US bank advertised that they could provide me a cashier's check for a small fee (something like $80 million - who can remember?). I agreed and they ran the card.

The secret agent working the front counter came back scratching her head; "uhh... it didn't work you'll have to try at our branch across the street." She explained that they had a limit for this sort of thing (probably $19 billion dollars) but the other branch would be able to do it without a problem. So I made my way to the other branch, in the meantime making contact with operatives at USAA to confirm my card's cash advance limit.

The counter-intelligence agent at the second US Bank branch attempted to run my card and also came back scratching his head. "It says there was an error. We actually can't try a cash advance twice within 24 hours and you already tried it across the street." Mission success began to look unlikely.

I made my way back to [redacted] property management headquarters and debriefed them on my mission to obtain certified funds in the amount of $20 billion dollars. We began a meeting with the joint chiefs to find alternate methods of satisfying the certified funds policy that day. As we were meeting, I received a direct wire on my really cool looking watch computer with lots of green text and black backgrounds. It was from USAA operations informing me of a cash advance made on my card in the amount of 80 billion dollars. Surprise! US Bank counter-intel operatives had pulled an Ocean's eleven-style heist on my bank account - leaving my high and dry!

The nice ladies at [redacted] began to feel bad for me and the hassle they were causing with their "certified funds" policy and decided to take a chance on me and accept a personal check. Problem solved. The end ... or is it?

No, it's not.

US Bank denied all knowledge of the heist on my bank account and told me if it didn't resolve itself magically overnight to call USAA and have them take care of it. This was probably a trick so that I would wait while they got on a private jet out of the country.

On April 12 I communicated with USAA operatives and made a claim for the $80 billion dollars that was now missing out of my account. They immediately wired the money back into my account and bid me good day.

On April 13 I got another direct wire from USAA informing me of an $80 billion dollar debit from my account to US Bank. Foiled again! A call to my bank revealed the USAA operative from the day before didn't know what the heck he was talking about and only made it LOOK like the money was back in my account. Clearly US Bank has operatives everywhere. I realize at this point I can trust NO ONE.

USAA correctly filed a claim (this time) for my funds and credited the $80 billion back into my account (again). Problem solved. The end ... or is it?

No, it's not. Keep reading because I'm about to kick this story up a notch.

A week passes and on April 18th I get notification that US Bank has once again debited $80 billion dollars from my account. Attempted communication to US Bank was fruitless and they denied all knowledge of said transfer.

Shifty.

It's hard to keep track but according to my ledger US Bank has now taken $160 billion dollars ($3318.00 after fees) out of my account and I have nothing to show for it. Maybe someone is using my account as a personal piggy bank, or maybe some nefarious operative is just messing with me. Who knows?

A call into USAA revealed that they did not show a debit from US Bank, but in fact a credit! Odd, because I show a debit on my end. Here's the weird part: both sides show the SAME account balance. How can two ledgers show a $3318.00 ... I mean $160 billion ... dollar discrepancy but the totals can be the same?!

You thought the first part of the story was the mystery part, but I just blew your mind with this new, bigger and more exciting mystery! Boom! I told you I was going to kick it up a notch!

Remember that part of the story where I foreshadowed that USAA might be evil and that other part of the story where I said "trust NO ONE?" THIS is the part of the story where the world as it has been presented to you turns upside down and you realize that everyone is evil, even the agency that I aligned myself with (USAA).

Operatives in Texas confirmed that their "system is buggy and sometimes shows debits as credits and credits as debits." What?! Did Diebold write your banking software?! (Google it).

Now I don't know who to trust. Which ledger is correct? If the bank credits me my $80 billion dollars back a second time, will I be even again? I don't even know - I can't keep track off all the charges and subsequent credits! And apparently neither can my bank because some charges are showing up different for me than they are in the back-end system! Some credits are not showing up at all! How do we decide which paper trail is accurate?

This is the part of the story where we catch up to the present (the rest was a flashback). Investigation is underway by a whistleblower deep embedded in USAA's executive somethingerother branch and I've been promised a call back with a full debriefing in "3-5 business days." What will become of all my billions? Tune in next time for the exciting conclusion!

Roll credits.

Directed by M. Night Shamalaaayannan.

Here's a helpful translation guide for anyone looking for a place to live on Craigslist.

Adorable - This apartment is as cute as a button, but you'll need to sleep standing up because it's not big enough to lay down in.

Gorgeous - Sweet 90's brass fixtures.

Remodeled - Nobody would rent it, so we put a new doorknob on the front door.

Lovely - Boring.

Temporary Price Reduction - Nobody will rent this place from us. The only thing temporary about the price is that it will go down again next week.

Charming - A diamond in the rough, if you bring the diamond.

Affordable - Crappy.

Immaculate - From the look of those stains on the carpet, conception definitely took place here and it definitely wasn't immaculate.

No Deposit - For the love of all that is holy, why won't someone lease this place?!?

Inspiring - You might need drug-induced inspiration to love this place.

Here are some things I like for July.

1. Brown Cow Maple Yogurt

Tastes like dreams if dreams were made out of yogurt with maple syrup in it.

2. Purex 3-in-1 Laundry Sheets

How could something to do with laundry, a thing that I hate, make a list of things that are great? These sheets have detergent, softener, and anti-static stuff all in one. No measuring powder or liquids, just throw one of these sheets in with the laundry and transfer it with your clothes to the dryer.

3. Timbuk2 Freestlye XS messenger

It's small, it has pockets for all my gadgets including a sleeve for my iPad, phone, PSP, camera, etc. 35% off at Kirkham's in Salt Lake City.

4. HTC Evo

4G High Speed Wireless Data, 720p video recording, front facing camera for video chat, 8 megapixel camera, HDMI output, huge 4.3" display, Android bells and whistles, and a freaking sweet kick stand. Love it.

5. Nalgene Stainless Steel Water Bottle by Guyot Designs

A nice looking water bottle that I carry pretty much everywhere. To ensure its continued use I had to get one that I thought looked really cool and this is it. I've never been so hydrated.

"It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it."

--Edwin Way Teale Circle of the Seasons (1953)

Photo Courtesy LIFE.

A recent blog entry over at zerohedge has been making its way around the Internet. Since it's short, I will repost it in its entirety right here.

The government spent $175 million investigating the Challenger space shuttle disaster.

It spent $30 million investigating the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

The government only authorized $15 million for the 9/11 Commission.

And how much has the government authorized for the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission? You know, the commission charged with getting to the bottom of what caused the financial crisis?

Just $8 million.

You can tell alot about the questions which the government is truly interested in finding answers to by the amount of money it authorizes for the various investigations.

At first glance this seems like a gross oversight. First of all, we really spent 30 million tax payer dollars on the Monica Lewinsky investigation?

The financial meltdown is the biggest thing since things could be big - and we only spent eight million investigating it. That doesn't seem right, does it? I mean, it caused untold amounts of damage while the shuttle disasters were fairly self contained. The Lewinsky debacle didn't even do much damage at all in the long run. Eight million dollars?

The author than goes on to tell us how the government clearly doesn't care about getting to the bottom of the financial crisis. The implication is that they were involved or "they" are trying to protect those that profited from the fall of the American economy. Nefarious stuff, indeed. They're pulling the wool over our eyes.

Although everyone appears to have taken this hook, line, and sinker as evidence that the government is covering up or simply not caring enough about the financial crisis, there is a problem with the logic and facts that the author uses.
First of all, to imply that a set of completely unrelated investigations is comparable based solely on the cost of those investigations is an appeal to wealth and is completely illogical.
The amount an investigation costs should be the exact amount it takes to find an answer. The cost should not be determined in any way based on what previous, unrelated investigations have costs.

The author seems to argue we should be spending more money on an investigation into the financial crisis simply on the basis that we spent more on some other investigation. Doesn't he know money is tight? Doesn't he know what got us into the financial crisis in the first place?

There are lots of reasons costs might be different between two investigations. For NASA you have engineers, prototyping, hardware, and huge teams of people. With Monica Lewisnky you have DNA testing. There are a lot of things that might vary the cost. Also we're talking about criminal investigations versus non-criminal investigation versus informational inquiries.

There are certainly enough differences to show that you can't really compare the value of these investigations solely on cost.
This isn't to say that eight million dollars is enough, or that the investigation of the financial crisis is being conducted thoroughly enough. But if I was to make those claims, I would support them evidence and facts from which I would draw logical conclusions. I wouldn't frame some very specific piece of the data and draw wild unsupported conclusions from it.

The author of the article links to a New York Times piece where he got his eight million figure. In the same sentence as that figure is a figure of 38 million spent investigating the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Why doesn't he include that in his number?

The fact is that the eight million has nothing to do with ongoing criminal investigations and will most likely result in no prosecutions. The eight million is going towards the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, a congressionally appointed commission that is charged with finding what went wrong and how to prevent it. Citing this is the only thing the government is doing to investigate the meltdown is completely false, as there are many investigations.

As of January 2009, for example, the FBI had over 500 ongoing investigations regarding financial fraud and 38 specifically targeting companies involved in the financial crisis. How much money is being spent on those investigations? Many people have already been prosecuted and many more will be. I suspect that if you totaled all investigations you would find that the government is spending more money on investigations regarding the financial meltdown than on everything the author of this article cited combined. Most of these investigations were taking place well before the eight million was granted to the commission.

Lastly, the investigation being conducted by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission is ongoing. It's hard to draw conclusions about its effectiveness until it is done. It is expected that they will release their findings at the end of this year.

This article is not interesting, it's sensationalist, false, and irresponsible. It makes broad implications based off of assumptions, incomplete data, and a tinfoil hat conspiracy theory. There is nothing about this article that is even remotely useful, worthwhile, or demands further investigation. It is 100% fallacious, meaningless, represents lazy reporting and an absence of fact checking or remotely adequate research. Since the person who wrote this took the time to look up the numbers I can only assume that they were either purposefully misleading or incredibly stupid.

So who is pulling the wool over whose eyes?

What's worse than pointlessly whiling away your life sitting at a red light in the middle of the night? Sitting at another one right after the first one finally turns green.

You sit there at the red light, looking ahead you can see every other light on the street is green. There are no other cars - it's the middle of the night. There are no cars waiting on the side streets for their turn to go, no pedestrians pushing buttons to activate cross walks. As soon as this light you're stuck at turns green, you're home free.

Only, you're not, because just as soon as your light turns green, the one at the very next block turns red. Rinse and repeat - stop and go traffic when you're the only one on the road, all night long until you finally arrive at your destination.

This experience could be equated to trying to brush your teeth while getting punched in the face every five seconds. Just as soon as you get started you have to stop, and it hurts every time.

Eisenhower, the guy who pioneered the first pope-mobile-like plexiglass bubble from which to be admired by his adoring fans as he was cruising around in his limousine, knew a thing or two about energy and transportation. He thought sitting at a red light in the middle of the night was a waste of energy. He hated red lights so much he made the interstate highway system, a place free from red lights where you can drive as fast as you want and never ever stop (as long as you keep it under 65, Dale.).

The city where I grew up, Denver, has a pretty good handle on things. The planners there seem to realize that stop lights are only necessary for part of the day and that when they are no necessary they can be flashing yellow on the main thoroughfare and red on the side streets. During the day, the lights are timed so that, if you drive the speed limit, you can hit all consecutively green lights.

Here in Utah it is the opposite. Lights run with long long cycles at 3am, and during the day the lights are timed to make you stop as many times as humanly possible. At least, that's what it seem like. I think the Salt Lake City planners wanted their city to be known as a fun place, but didn't quite get what a "red light district" was supposed to entail exactly.

Sometimes you will be sitting at an intersection where every light in every direction is red for minutes at a time. I don't know if there is some traffic control center where people are just messing with us, or if the damn things are malfunctioning. Neither thought is very comforting.

The problem is that here in Utah if you were to make an intersection flash yellow, people would not know what to do at all. It would be mass chaos. People would slam their breaks on, their heads exploding and their brains splattered all over the inside of their windshields. We still haven't figured out stop signs, surely blinking lights would be way too much.

Still, I think even this obstacle could be overcome with a few educational billboards (Utahns LOVE billboards) and generous applications of my horn.

So how bout it, Utah? Can we get some blinking yellow lights at night and some properly timed light sequences during the day? Then we can get to work on a proper red light district.

I've turned off auto-approval for commenters. I'm really going to miss constant messages from people who think I'm Bill Gates, but it's getting old. Until I return from outer blogness I don't want to deal with all the junk.

But if you're human and you have something to say, leave a comment and I'll get around to approving it, promise. If you're a robot and you want to sell me shoes or summer sausages or something, then just go ahead and 01100100 01101001 01100101 00001101 00001010.

Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me a hundred time, we'll still keep giving you chances. 

Sony has a long history of doing wrong by their customers, the apologizing for it, then doing it again.  It's sad, really.  A lot of grew up in an era when Sony represented technology and awesomeness.  Sony was the Apple of the 80's, and the Walkman was their iPod. 

The sad thing is that since the Walkman, Sony has not managed to come up with anything really ground breaking or compelling.  They keep trying, but they keep failing - miserably.  Here's a history of Sony apologies and screw ups:

First there was betamax, which Sony invented.  It was a superior format to VHS in almost every way so it should not have been hard to get adoption.  But because Sony cares more about money and restrictive licensing than they do about costumers and actually being successful, it fell flat on its face.  If you had a betamax player, you were a sucker.

Then there was minidisc, my first real experience with Sony.  They had already apologized for how bad they miffed it with betamax and had promised to do better with minidisc.  I bought a minidisc player and even picked up a Yamaha MD8 multi-track data minidisc recorder (I dropped $1200 on it in high school).

It was sad that neither on the consumer side or on the pro (semi-pro, really) side of things Sony failed to deliver.  Their music software, required to use your minidisc player, was riddled with bugs and restrictive DRM.  They promised updates that never came, restricted licensing of their technology, and soon the format I had invested so much in was dead in the water, just like betamax.  I was the sucker.

So I vowed that I would never buy another Sony product again.  They just didn't seem to care about costumers, innovation, quality, or anything really, other than making tons of money.  They didn't seem to realize that if you do all those first things, the money will follow. 

About 10 years later I broke my Sony boycott to buy a Sony Reader.  Surprisingly, I had a great experience with it and enjoyed it very much.  Their software still sucked - really bad - but by this time there were 3rd party solutions that could do much better.  Overall, I thought the Reader was good - better even than the Kindle and other alternatives because of its openness.  You must really suck if Sony is doing it better than you.

After my good experience with the Reader I thought Sony had turned a new corner, so I slowly waded into their sea of products.  I bought a PS3 and received a PSP for Christmas. 

The PS3 is a pretty decent gaming machine, but falls short in other areas.  It tries to be a home media solution, but doesn't have wide format support or decent navigation abilities.  It's pretty weak, really.  Every update they come out with adds stupid features that encourage you to spend more money rather than addressing the most basic issues.

Speaking of updates, they just released one that completely removed a major feature from their systems.  They removed the option to install other OSes - one of the main reasons I bought a PS3 over the alternatives.  They simply removed it, no questions, no options.  If you were running another OS it was deleted and there was jack you could do about it.  Sony responded to criticism by saying "STFU and bend over, we don't care about you."

The update was worse for me.  I installed it and it physically bricked my entire system.  I can't even turn it on any more.  Apparently they used such crappy solder to put the thing together that it litterally melts itself to the point it doesn't work anymore.  This isn't even an isolated problem, either - it's completely widespread.  Sony doesn't care about this either - they'll just tell you to buy a new console or pay $250 to have it repaired.

I tried to get my PS3 repaired at first, but I realized that I don't even want it.  My Mac Mini is a vastly more capable media server for my TV, and I didn't even play games all that much on the PS3. 

There are lots of other problems I have had with Sony and their products, but for the sake of brevity I won't go into any more detail.  The bottom line is they don't give a damn about their costumers.  Suffice it to say that I will be re-instating my personal Sony boycott and will always recommend my friends and family away from Sony products. 

Here's a neat, bulleted list of things I'd rather do than buy another Sony product for as long as I live:

• Stick a red hot soldering iron in my eye
• Peal the skin off my entire head starting with my eyelid
• Get on a plane with a bunch of rapid terrorists
• Bite my fingernails off, one by one
• Pull out each one of my chest hairs with a rusty pair of pliers
• Sit on hot coals
• Be buried alive
• Buy a Microsoft product