BBC News - Obama warns G20 leaders on budget cuts
... The governments of several large European countries, Germany and the United Kingdom among them, have recently outlined plans for spending cuts.If Europe shoots its economy, China will lose a big export market. So it's a credible threat, even if insane.
In comments apparently directed at China, Mr Obama also stressed the need for flexible exchange rates to ensure a balanced global economy.
I visited my local AT&T store today to confirm that AT&T iPhone pre-ordering is done. They’ll have some phones in store 6/24 for those keen to wait in line and be disappointed. You can still pre-order via Apple, but I’ll be on the road 7/14 so I’ll wait until late July to get my iPhone 4.
I took advantage of my AT&T visit to ask some staff questions. One of the odder things about AT&T is that, despite being evil even by publicly traded company standards, their staff are remarkably personable and fairly knowledgeable.
I had 4 questions. The last two are interesting.
Asking to see a contract brought the manager over in a hurry. He acted like I’d asked to see his porn collection.
After a bit of work I ended up with an outdated (7/31/2009) Terms of Service document and a generic “Service Agreement” that seems to be a current “Terms of Service” document. He couldn’t come up with anything reflecting the 11/09 policy changes.
Here’s what I ended up thinking:
There are a few noteworthy clauses in AT&T’s current generic service agreement:
Your Service Commitment begins on the day we activate your service. You have received certain benefits from us in exchange for any Service Commitment greater than one month. … If your Service Commitment includes the purchase of certain specified Equipment on or after June 1, 2010, the Early Termination Fee will be $325 minus $10 for each full month of your Service Commitment that you complete. (For a complete list of the specified Equipment, check www.att.com/equipmentETF). Otherwise, your Early Termination Fee will be $150 minus $4 for each full month of your Service Commitment that you complete...
The enhanced ETF is not iPhone specific, it also applies to the iPAQ Glisten (lord, that would burn!) and the Samsung “Jack”. Imagine the horror of paying that fee on an iPAQ Glisten.
I didn’t realize my non-AT&T roaming was potentially limited ….
… If your minutes of use (including unlimited services) on other carrier networks ("off-net usage") during any two consecutive months exceed your off-net usage allowance, AT&T may, at its option, terminate your service, deny your continued use of other carriers' coverage or change your plan to one imposing usage charges for off-net usage. Your off-net usage allowance is equal to the lesser of 750 minutes or 40% of the Anytime Minutes included with your plan. AT&T will provide notice that it intends to take any of the above actions, and you may terminate the agreement…
and I bet this clause means AT&T can cut off my Google Voice calls to Canada at any time [3] …
… Unlimited voice services are provided solely for live dialog between two individuals. Unlimited voice services may not be used for conference calling, call forwarding, monitoring services, data transmissions, transmission of broadcasts, transmission of recorded material, or other connections which do not consist of uninterrupted live dialog between two individuals. If AT&T finds that you are using an unlimited voice service offering for other than live dialog between two individuals, AT&T may, at its option terminate your service or change your plan to one with no unlimited usage components. AT&T will provide notice that it intends to take any of the above actions, and you may terminate the agreement.
Of course several phones do support conference calling, so they can’t enforce this one too often. They also have to give notice.
The bottom line is that mobile phone contracting is hideously complex. Apple tried to change that with iPhone 1.0, but they failed (I give them full credit for trying). I’d love to see an ambitious Attorney General take this topic on.
See also:
[1] Of course if data services are used it will incur massive charges, but that’s another matter. My son’s number is enrolled in a $5/month AT&T service that allows me to disable his AT&T network data access. There are also relatively painless hacks that do the same thing.
[2] I’d like to see the contract/agreement where this is documented. I wonder if that’s agreed to as part of the iPhone agreement: “If buying an iPhone, you agree that use of the iPhone acts as an acceptance of the Apple and third party terms and conditions included with the iPhone.”
[3] Actually, they can’t. With the original Google Voice service I called a number, which then rang my mother’s number in Montreal. Now I use their (crummy) iPhone web app, and they call me first. So I think the current arrangements skirts the current contract. Also, does this mean a Robocall to my mobile phone is a violation of my contract?
Update 7/25/10: Astoundingly, when I picked up my new iPhone I asked the question again -- and was told my son would definitely be enrolled in a data plan even though his phone is not under contract and has no subsidy and he'd be using a contract-free iPhone. In other words, exactly the opposite of what I was told a few weeks ago. I have a post pending with contract excerpts. I'll be filing a complaint with the MN state attorney general and with the offices of our federal Senators.
The inestimable Gail Collins says it best (emphases mine):
…. We are frustrated, too, and it’s possible that Obama may never be able to give the speech that will make us feel better. He may never really lace into the oil companies or issue the kind of call to arms on energy that the environmentalists are yearning for.
That’s because it won’t get him anywhere. Unlike Bush, he has no national consensus to build upon. He’d barely finished his muted remarks on Tuesday before the House minority leader, John Boehner, accused him of exploiting the crisis “to impose a job-killing national energy tax** on struggling families and small business.” Michael Steele, the Republican Party chairman, claimed that the president was “manipulating this tragic national crisis for selfish political gain.” And the ever-popular Representative Michele Bachmann denounced the BP restitution fund as “redistribution of wealth” and “one more gateway for government control.”
As a political leader, Barack Obama seems to know what he’s doing. His unsatisfying call for a new energy policy sounded very much like the rhetoric on health care reform that used to drive Democrats nuts: open to all ideas, can’t afford inaction, if we can put a man on the moon. ... But at the end of that health care slog, he wound up with the groundbreaking law that had eluded his predecessors for decades. The process of wringing it out of Congress was so slow and oblique that even when it was over it was hard to appreciate what he’d won. But win he did.
Ironic. The man we elected because we hoped his feel-good campaign speeches might translate into achievement is actually a guy who is going to achieve, even if his presidential speeches leave us feeling blah.
We live in whitewater times (see Stross - 2008). There’s going to be crisis after crisis for years and decades to come. We can’t freak out every time we have a historic ecological, economic, social, climatic or geological catastrophe*. We need to deal with them, learn from them, try to prevent each class of catastrophe from recurring too soon.
America is entering the rapids in a GOP-vandalized kayak, and much of the nation has tuned out. There’s too much bad news, too much uncertainty. Some are so far gone they’re signing on to whacko political movements. As Collins writes, Obama “has no national consensus to build upon”. He has to find what’s possible.
Today Obama has extracted $20 billion of possible, a Ninja move that has left the GOP stunned and gasping. That counts for a lot more than a speech. Meanwhile the prospect of BP’s annihilation has concentrated minds in in the oil industry more than any amount of words and easily manipulated laws (not that we don’t need the rules and regs, but financial collapse impresses capitalists more).
We’ll never get another President this good. Better appreciate him while you can.
Oh, and the guy needs a vacation. We need to tell him to take a good one.
* Incidentally, I despised Bush and wanted him fired – but not for Katrina. There he showed only average incompetence.
** This is “cap and trade” aka “carbon tax in drag”. The GOP does well in southern states, maybe they figure it’s the temperature that helps.
The Animal-Cruelty Syndrome - NYTimes.com:
... significant reason for the increased attention to animal cruelty is a mounting body of evidence about the link between such acts and serious crimes of more narrowly human concern, including illegal firearms possession, drug trafficking, gambling, spousal and child abuse, rape and homicide...
... In his famous series of 1751 engravings, “The Four Stages of Cruelty,” William Hogarth traced the life path of the fictional Tom Nero: Stage 1 depicts Tom as a boy, torturing a dog; Stage 4 shows Tom’s body, fresh from the gallows where he was hanged for murder, being dissected in an anatomical theater. And animal cruelty has long been recognized as a signature pathology of the most serious violent offenders. As a boy, Jeffrey Dahmer impaled the heads of cats and dogs on sticks; Theodore Bundy, implicated in the murders of some three dozen people, told of watching his grandfather torture animals; David Berkowitz, the “Son of Sam,” poisoned his mother’s parakeet....I am surprised this hasn't gotten more formal research attention attention in the past. Perhaps scholars assumed it was self-evident? Formal investigations are now confirming long held beliefs. That's good research -- not all long held beliefs are empirically supported.
Strange Arguments For Higher Rates - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com
... My take on the current economic situation is quite simple, and I would have thought corresponds to standard economics. Right now, we clearly don’t have enough demand to make full use of the economy’s productive capacity. This means that the real interest rate is too high. And so the “natural” thing is for the real rate to fall. Yes, that would mean a negative real rate. So?
The trouble is that getting that negative real rate isn’t easy, because the nominal rate can’t go below zero [jg: zero bound], and there’s no easy way to create expected inflation. If you ask what would happen if prices were completely flexible, the answer, as I figured out long ago, is that prices would fall so far now that people would expect them to rise in the future, creating expected inflation. But prices aren’t that flexible, which is why we turn to quantitative easing, fiscal policy, and more.
Surely, though, we want to get rates as close to their appropriate level as possible — which means a zero nominal rate. There’s nothing “unnatural” about it. On the contrary, the “natural rate of interest”, as Wicksell defined it, is clearly negative right now.
So why does Rajan feel that there must be something wrong with low rates (and he’s not alone)? I think his language, with its odd moral tone, is the giveaway: it’s the sense that economic policy is supposed to involve being tough on people, not giving money away cheap.
I actually understand the seductiveness of that posture; I can sort of understand how economists succumb to it. But right now, with the world desperately in need of clear thinking, is no time to give in to the subtle allure of inflicting economic pain.
Bob Herbert - The Courage to Leave Afghanistan - NYTimes.comWe may be in the all too common situation where, if there is any game plan, it's not one that can be spoken. For example, our game plan might be to divide Afghanistan into feudal baronies, and make each Baron responsible for their domain. Keep things quiet, or get a missile through the castle window. Not necessarily a bad idea, but not one that Obama can verbalize.
.... What’s happening in Afghanistan is not only tragic, it’s embarrassing. The American troops will fight, but the Afghan troops who are supposed to be their allies are a lost cause. The government of President Hamid Karzai is breathtakingly corrupt and incompetent — and widely unpopular to boot. And now, as The Times’s Dexter Filkins is reporting, the erratic Mr. Karzai seems to be giving up hope that the U.S. can prevail in the war and is making nice with the Taliban.
There is no overall game plan, no real strategy or coherent goals, to guide the fighting of U.S. forces. It’s just a mind-numbing, soul-chilling, body-destroying slog, month after month, year after pointless year. The 18-year-olds fighting (and, increasingly, dying) in Afghanistan now were just 9 or 10 when the World Trade Center and Pentagon were attacked in 2001...
[Note - see the updates on this one. AT&T is falling victim to its own complexity.]
The Devil is usually an elegant gentleman. Makes sense, doesn’t it? There’s a certain elegance to the best devilishness. Tobacco industries once had that knack, but today AT&T excels.
I just learned of a small contract change AT&T made in November 2009 – eight months ago. It doesn’t impact us yet, but it will when we get our new phones and new contracts. It’s a beauty.
Before I explain what changed, let me describe what was once possible. I’ll use my son as an example – call him “John”.
John is on our family plan. We pay $10 a month for that. He had my old Nokia (out of contract), so he’s not on a subsidized phone contract. A neighbor gave him an old Samsung Blackjack (Windows Mobile); he likes the keypad so we switched SIM cards. No contract, no data plan.
Of course if he fired up a browser, on the old Nokia or the old WinMobile Blackjack the data would flow. Sprint allows customers to disable data flow on a browser-equipped phone, but AT&T does not. In this case John is enrolled in a “smart wireless” plan where I’ve set his data flow to zero (costs $5/month).
What we’d like, of course, is for him to have a phone with WiFi services – like my old iPhone. Similar to the the Blackjack, but data when WiFi is available. That’s what we were planning on.
Ok, now here’s where things get really evil.
If you have a post 11/09 contract, there’s fine print that says that if AT&T considers your phone a “smart phone”, it must have a data plan even if the phone is fully paid for and has no ongoing subsidy. If you put your SIM card in one of those phones, AT&T will detect it and automatically enroll the subscriber in a data plan. (Supposedly the least costly plan.)
A data plan, by the way, that’s pure profit for AT&T. The money is not being used to pay off a subsidized phone, and it’s not going to, say, Apple. It’s pure AT&T profit.
Old WiFi equipped smart phones (RIM, iPhone, some Samsung) etc just got a lot less valuable. If a customer is going to get dinged for data services anyway, why not get a new phone and a contract?
Wow. Philip Morris would be proud of AT&T. This is high grade evil. AT&T is still a master of the complexity attack.
See also:
Update: As noted in comments AT&T is catching up with Verizon, just as when they recently doubled or tripled the penalty for early contract termination. Those two are Scylla and Charybdis.
Update 6/11/10: It occurs to me that one of my state Senators is Al Franken, and that in Obama administration consumer protection isn’t a joke. I’ll write his office. Who knows, maybe he’s ready to take on the mobile phone companies (though he does have his hands full these days)…
Update 6/17/10: I ask the same question at an AT&T retail store and get a quite different answer (new contracts only).
I didn't think I had much to say about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. My one insight was that Google could, as a public service, assemble a team to deploy disaster-specific search engines. Google librarians and researchers are well suited to continuously enhance a custom search engine that will facilitate research and discovery at the time of catastrophe. These future disaster search tools would be paired with custom Google Maps services.
I'm surprised Google hasn't done this yet. I hope they'll do it for all our many disasters to come.
That was my one insight -- until tonight. Now I have something to say to my (much appreciated) President.
I got the idea when Emily compared my personal stories of corporate euphemisms to BP's spin. In a forehead smacking moment I realized BP is probably no more or less clever than the vast publicly traded company I work for. That means that Obama's team is dealing with EVPs -- people whose great skill is the ability to thrive in the bowels of a typically dysfunctional publicly traded company. They can tell a good story, but they really don't know what's going on and they don't know they don't know.
There are likely engineers in BP who do know what's going on, but they've been locked away in dark rooms and surrounded by corporate security. They'll never be allowed contact with the outside world. Most of them aren't comfortable in that role anyway.
Too bad. Team Obama has to track these people down. They won't be VPs or EVPs. They're probably not even managers. They're individual contributors who've been at BP for ten years or more. They know what's going on. It might take the NSA and the CIA to track these people down, but it has to be done. They have to be dragged kicking and screaming from the bowels of BP. In softly lit rooms they can be slipped a few million dollars -- since once they talk they'll never work in the industry again. Then ply them with beer until they open up.
Take notes.
Your Brain on Computers - Attached to Technology and Paying a Price - NYTimes.comSweet. Great font, highly readable, multiple pages in one place. Much faster to read. No ads.
... The chairman of Foxconn, Terry Gou, told the Taipei shareholders’ meeting that the company was looking to shift some unspecified production from China to automated plants in Taiwan, Reuters reported..The alternative to the Foxconn employee is the robot. Every year the robot gets cheaper. Every year Foxconn employees become more expensive.
... AT&T has also overhauled their data overage structure, giving DataPlus subscribers and additional 200MB as needed for $15, while DataPro users get extra data at $10 a gigabyte... if you’re either over-using or under-using your plan, AT&T’s going to be extremely flexible about letting switch back and forth between DataPlus and DataPro. You can call and have your plan changed at the next billing cycle, have it prorated immediately, or - hold on to your seats - have the plan retroactively applied to the entire current billing cycle...The $10/GB rate makes the tethering more practical. Definitely more complex, but I wouldn't be surprised if AT&T's accounting system can't support a finer grained process. If Apple bundles a good metering app with OS 4 this new plan would be an improvement for my family. (I wonder if Apple/AT&T will consider selling an iPhone without a data plan ...)
... To turn into Tyrone Banks’s subdivision in Hickory Ridge is to find his dream in seeming bloom. Stone lions guard his door, the bushes are trimmed and a freshly waxed sport utility vehicle sits in his driveway.
For years, Mr. Banks was assiduous about paying down his debt: he stayed two months ahead on his mortgage, and he helped pay off his mother’s mortgage.
Two years ago, his doorbell rang, and two men from Wells Fargo offered to consolidate his consumer loans into a low-cost mortgage.
“I thought, ‘This is great! ’ ” Mr. Banks says. “When you have four kids, college expenses, you look for any savings.”
What those men did not tell Mr. Banks, he says (and Ms. Thomas, who studied his case, confirms), is that his new mortgage had an adjustable rate. When it reset last year, his payment jumped to $1,700 from $1,200.
Months later, he ruptured his Achilles tendon playing basketball*, hindering his work as a janitor. And he lost his job at FedEx. Now foreclosure looms....Mr. Banks leveraged the real estate bubble to pay off the costs of the the higher education bubble. The real estate bubble burst, leaving him underwater. Now the higher education bubble is bursting, leaving him with high tuition loans for a product of declining value.
