Science, the media and the Himalayan glacier. What's wrong?

This morning's NPR Marketwatch summarized the latest IPCC climate change report. They included the mandatory scornful reference to the first IPCC's "error" on Himalayan glaciers ...

AR4 WGII Chapter 10: Asia - 10.6.2 The Himalayan glaciers:

... Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world (see Table 10.9) and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate. Its total area will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 km2 by the year 2035 (WWF, 2005)...

Of course since the first IPCC report the world has exceeded the worst case scenarios for carbon emission; despite the first American depression since the 1930s.

So when do today's mainstream climate scientists expect those Himalayan glaciers to vanish?

I thought this would be easy to discover, even though far too much science is still behind paywalls - despite some uncelebrated but huge progress in the waning days of the Bush II.

It wasn't easy at all.

This was the best recent survey I could find, but it's abstract only [1] ...

Himalayan glaciers: The big picture is a montage PNAS Kargel et al

... The gaffe by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change helped to trigger a global political retreat from climate change negotiations, and it may prove to have been one of the more consequential scientific missteps in human history. An equally incorrect claim, on a different timescale, was that large Himalayan glaciers may be responding today to climate shifts 6,000–15,000 y ago (2). However, both mistakes (1, 2) and some solid scientific reporting on Himalayan glacier dynamics (4–10) highlight large gaps in the observational record. In PNAS, Fujita and Nuimura (11) competently reduced the knowledge gap....

I thought with the clues in the abstract I could find new disappearance predictions, perhaps for more specific regions of the Tibetan/Indian glaciers.

I couldn't -- at least not in my 20 minute time budget.

There's something wrong here. Something wrong with science, the media, us, Google, or all of the above. I'm positive there are mainstream predictions, but scientists aren't marketing them -- and the media isn't digging.

We need scientists with more spine, because nobody else has any.

[1] The abstract overstates the significance of the "gaffe". Humanity was, and is, profoundly unready to think about global climate change. We would have found another reason to defer thought.

Update 11/19/2011: After writing up notes to help my son with his 9th grade history, I realized why this particular bit of climate change is so sensitive. The Indus River is fed from the Himalayan snowpack. India is named after that river ...

Social media is so 2000

GigaOm has a longish cloud computing post around a Peachtree Capital Advisors investor survey (full report is by request only).

I usually don't pay much attention to consulting group reports like this, but there were a few comments that struck me as interesting....

VCs: Don’t mistake cloud computing for cloud opportunity — Cloud Computing News

... tech investors are underwhelmed by social computing: A whopping 88 percent characterized the social media segment (including collaboration) as overvalued....

... The whole big data explosion that most businesses are trying to capture depends on the wide availability of diverse data from many sources, including the so-called Bermuda Triangle of Facebook, Twitter and Google...

... 35 percent of those surveyed said they think enterprise software as a category is undervalued...

By enterprise software they presumably mean Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, etc.

I was struck by the declining interest in social media. That may be because investors figure it's a mature segment (!) and Facebook owns it. Or that consumers are (re)turning to Cable TV.

I think both may be true. When a sclerotic company like Google 2.0 jumps into a domain, you can be pretty sure it's yesterday's news. Consumer tech cycles are viciously short now; fashion designers understand this all too well.

On the other hand, I'm also impressed by how quiet Facebook, G+ and the rest feel now, and "how happy this man looks" (SplatF). By my estimate we're in year 12 of the long depression, and we have years to go. Cable TV has not been displaced, and if consumers have limited time and attention ...

BBC Jan 14, 2012: How Europe was saved

BBC news Jan 14, 2012.

In a shocking move earlier today the European Central Bank announced an orderly default of Greece and the appointment of Professor Paul Krugman as the head of the Bank.

In a brief speech Dr. Krugman dumped a paper bag of Euros from the podium. "There's plenty more where they came from" he said. "I'll get 3.5% inflation if I have to print them myself". Within moments of these announcements China and the United States each purchased 200 billion Euro Bonds in a new offering.

Trading volumes broke prior records then broken them again. Goldman Sachs bet heavily against the ECB strategy, and by the end of the day it had lost over 80 billion US dollars. The future independence of Goldman Sachs is now in doubt ...

Thai floods - microcosm of global climate change

Three years ago Corinne Kisner wrote ...

Climate Change Case Study: Thailand July 2008

... Climate change threatens all three important sectors of Thailand’s economy: agriculture, tourism, and trade...

... The effects of climate change, including higher surface temperatures, floods, droughts, severe storms and sea level rise, put Thailand’s rice crops at risk and threaten to submerge Bangkok within 20 years.  The damage to agriculture, coastal tourism, and the capital city as consequences of climate change will have enormous economic, cultural and environmental impacts: one degree of warming will destroy the rice crops that are central to the economy, and a few centimeters of sea level rise will submerge the capital city and devastate coastal tourism...

Today Cringely reviews some of the impacts of the 2011 Thailand floods ...

I, Cringely » Blog Archive » Intel is fit to be Thai’d - Cringely on technology

... The industrial park that’s sitting underwater still in Thailand will be out of action for at least four months, I’m told, and possibly as long as 12 months. And what happens then? Why another monsoon, of course!  The flooded industrial park, built in an old rice paddy on a historic flood plain with little added drainage will go under water during the next big storm, too.

The hard disks manufactured in the flooded region are nearly all 3.5-inch drives, so those will be most immediately affected. Since 2.5-inch drives are in ascendancy with 1.8-inch almost out of business and 3.5-inch in decline, the global product mix is likely to change even more, with 3.5-inch drives possibly reaching end-of-life earlier than expected.

But wait, there’s more!  Among the Thai plants currently under water is a Western Digital factory that makes 80 percent of hard drive stepper spindle motors in the world. So while the 3.5-inch drive supply will be most immediately affected, 30-60 days later every other type of drive will be in as short supply...

Are these the floods Kisner predicted? I don't know of course. In 1981 I remember wading through Bangkok's PraduNaam (water/fish market) on the way to the office. The city has flooded before. Thailand will flood again.

Still, this is what we expect -- bigger events happening more often. Most people, however, didn't expect the world supply of computer components to be restricted. Thailand has come a long way since I lived there.

What lessons can we learn? What lessons are technology companies learning?

They're learning that in the "whitewater world" risk has to be distributed. Manufacturing cannot be concentrated in one region, one country, or even one climate zone. We will have to learn redundancy and flexibility. The companies that learn that first will have a large competitive advantage.

Today is a good day to have a functioning disk drive factory.

Google 2.0 gives Microsoft ammunition

Via Daring Fireball Linked List ...

Google Atmosphere or “Admosphere”? - Why Microsoft

.. More importantly, with advertising revenue (and therefore mining customer data) remaining central to Google’s business model, and leadership that until recently took pride in declaring comfort with getting “right up to the creepy line” around privacy. Every CIO needs to ask if that value system is consistent with your privacy needs.  Are you comfortable with every click in your business, every document, and every communication being in Google’s hands?  Are your customers and business partners?...

... Organizations need to plan for the future without having to question a cloud provider's long term commitment to their business.  Despite the need for customers to understand their roadmap, Google and others often surprise their customers by unexpectedly removing important features - or adding new ones - which increases both headaches and cost. These unexpected changes often lead to more work....

I don't trust Google 2.0. Microsoft has a fat target now.

Oprah

I'm not exactly a TV guy.

Emily and I watched Star Trek Next Generation. That was early 90s. Before that, MASH I think. After that, almost nothing. Saw a Simpson episode once.

Even so, I knew there was a TV celebrity named Oprah, that she lived in Chicago, was black, a Democrat, and fabulously wealthy. Sometimes I'd see Oprah magazine around the house, but I don't think I ever read it.

So I read Caitlin Flanagan's The Glory of Oprah empty of impressions.

Now I'm impressed.

What a hell of a life.

Go Oprah.

A good time to invest in old bicycles?

As all my friends know, I'm one of those annoyingly cheerful Pollyannas, nothing like that Kassandra fellow we all ignore [1].

So I liked Jay Goltz's NYT blog post on the case for optimism ...

...  things have slowly been getting better. In 2011, I hired about five additional people. And I really hired them. No 1099 contract workers, no temporary workers, no part time...

... seeing an increase in the amount of furniture people are buying, partially because houses have been selling again and people are moving again. Large real estate projects in the corporate world that have been on hold are being completed, and art is being bought for the walls. And my picture-framing business has started to see customers who come in with art they say they have been meaning to frame...

... With the exception of things like restaurant meals and car washes, many purchases can be put off only so long. Eventually, they have to happen. Roofs, air conditioning units, clothes, cars and even dental care will be bought. In my business, I have been buying new equipment –  trucks, computers — and taking care of maintenance that had been avoided the previous couple of years. I have talked to four car dealers who say they are very busy, as well many other business owners from roofing contractors to a large carpeting business. Almost all say things are better and that they believe pent-up demand is one reason...

This is how balance sheet or even liquidity trap recessions are supposed to end. It may take a very long time, but eventually people spend. Or wars happen and governments spend (oops, that wasn't so optimisitic).

There are some countervailing sentiments however. Europe is doing a slow motion version of the Crash of '09. Maybe we'll get to see how it plays out without massive governmental intervention [2].

Meanwhile, perhaps related to the slow motion train wreck of European finance, Google is cutting back on its projects. Adobe just shut down its decade-long investments in Flash, Flex, and Air. Olympus is collapsing because it can no longer conceal losses from 17 years ago -- and nobody believes Olympus is the only Japanese, or US, company with falsified accounts. ATT is squeezing customers hard. Apple's quality problems continue.

In a development that goes largely unnoticed, corporations are taking a "destroy the village to save it" approach to information security. The diversion of corporate wealth to elite compensation continues, with effects that are poorly understood.

Lastly, our whitewater world is no less frothy, complexity attacks are still ubiquitous and virtually unnoticed - and the AIs are getting smarter [3]. If you're a 'structuralist', you'd say that the Great Disruptors are still working on the world order.

And there's the "China bubble" (334,000 Google hits today).

So is this a good time to invest in proven bicycles, long lasting antimicrobials, and garden tools?

Well, bicycles are always a good idea, but I suspect what lies ahead is, as usual, a lot like what lies behind.

Somethings are improving. Other things are worsening. So the US will see some trendline improvement with periodic disruptions -- and we'll be lucky to do that well.

[1] We all know, of course, that the curse of Cassandra was that she would be always right and always ignored.
[2] It is comically ironic that the "marketarian" leaning US government should be able to intervene and the European Government cannot. Oh, wait, that's right. Europe doesn't have a government .... 
[3] Meanwhile quantum computing is looking more real every day. Not that that will be disruptive.

What are the consequences of extreme executive income?

Despite a few hiccups in our economy, the diversion of money to executive compensation continues, particularly to the shareholder employees [1] of large publicly traded corporations. The US is in the lead, but other countries are following a similar trend.

I've seen much discussion of the trend, but not so much about the effects on corporations - regardless of social justice or market operation [2].

I don't think we know what it means, but I can make some informed guesses.

First, we can dispense with the myth that employees don't know what CEOs are paid. I suspect even people working with their arms and backs know their CEO's compensation. Certainly middle-management and knowledge workers know.

So how does that affect employees? And, perhaps more interestingly, how does it affect executives?

Employees, in most corporations today, see limited raises, underfunded projects, difficult work conditions and employment uncertainty. They do the arithmetic; half the CEO's compensation would fund all the projects they know of. This has obvious and direct effects on morale.

No, they don't imagine they'll sit in the CEO seat one day, or even another C-seat. Employees aren't that dumb.

How does this affect executives?

Well, it's a rare human who doesn't think they deserve their salary. If you pay a CEO 50 million dollars, they assume they deserve 50 million dollars. They can do arithmetic too. This must mean they are 250 times smarter, faster, wiser, stronger, and better than their superstar worker bees. They have gifts far beyond the ken of mortal men.

They make decisions accordingly.

It also moves the executive class into a different sort of reality. They still age and die, but most of the time that is forgotten. They are free of the other concerns of mortal life. They don't fly coach. They don't deal with time tracking and travel expenses. They don't have to manage their Flex accounts. Their lives are relatively complexity free.

Executive hyper-compensation may explain a lot of the poor decisions and poor returns of the modern publicly traded company. Not so much from the diversion of revenue, but from its impacts on employees and, most of all, because of its effect on executives.

--

[1] The CEO, CFO, etc of a publicly traded company are, in theory, employees of shareholders.
[2] I think this is a market failure. I've known several CEO class executives. They are not necessarily imaginative, insightful or academically intelligent, but they are always good at operating in the corporate setting, they always work very long hours, and they always sacrifice a great deal. Whether that helps the corporation or not is debatable; their selection pressures are complex. Even so, it would be reasonable to compensate a CEO of this sort at 1-2 million dollars (total) a year. We are far beyond that level of compensation at large PTCs.

There is a contrary argument of course. At a certain level of power and wealthy, individuals gain direct access to the global wealth stream. There are many ways to divert tens of millions of dollars from that stream that don't involve working for a PTC. Perhaps that's what boards are bidding against.

Google 2.0

I liked Google 1.0. Even in its fading days it gave us the data liberation front.

The DLF had a twitter feed. Their last post is dated September 15th, 2011.

Google 1.0 died on November 2nd, 2011. The Google 2.0 era belongs to Larry Page (emphases mine) ...

Google’s Chief Works to Trim a Bloated Ship - NYTimes.com

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Larry Page, Google’s chief executive, so hates wasting time at meetings that he once dumped his secretary to avoid being scheduled for them.

... It is losing employees to the new, hotter start-ups, and is being pushed around by government regulators and competitors like Facebook, Apple and Amazon, which are all vying for people’s online time...

Naysayers fret that in his rush to refocus the company, and especially in ending projects, he risks squelching Google’s trademark innovation, which bubbles up when engineers are given the time to experiment. “He’s going to lose some people at the end of the day,” said one employee who, like others, agreed to speak only anonymously because the company bars them from talking to the press without prior approval.

... “It’s much more of a style like Steve Jobs than the three-headed monster that Google was,” said a former Google executive who has spoken with current executives about the changes and spoke anonymously to preserve business relationships. “When Eric was there, you’d walk into a product meeting or a senior staff meeting, and everyone got to weigh in on every decision. Larry is much more willing to make an O.K. decision and make it now, rather than a perfect decision later.”

.. The most significant change at the company is the killing of projects Mr. Page deems unworthy...

Some employees find it frustrating to discover they do not fit into Mr. Page’s plans. “These teams are unfortunate casualties of these types of decisions,” one said...

Google 1.0 was powerful, but it tried to do good. I could overlook its effective monopoly because it did so many good things for me personally -- and it was occasionally goofy.

Google 2.0 is powerful, and ruthless. It reminds me of another monopoly that was astoundingly successful seventeen years ago. Google may be similarly successful, but I hope not. I don't think Google 2.0 will handle power well.

In praise of the (almost) modern bicycle

The Subaru is in the shop, so I get an extra day of bike commuting this week. Most weeks I'm allowed one day of bike commuting leisure, but this week I have two. It's a blessing.

During today's commute though, the shifting was rough. I adjusted the cable, but it didn't help. Finally, i took it down to my workshop.

Wow. I'm amazed that Shimano Deore XT derailleur could shift at all. It was coated with sedimentary rock forming from strata of clay and oil and leaf and the odd bug. After a bit of excavating and polishing thought it shifts like new.

That's incredible. I paid $600 for that bike over 14 years ago ...

Commuting/Touring Bike

... I ended up buying the 1996 T400, primarily because I already owned the wheels and components found on the T2000 (I did spend $5.00 or so to upgrade the crummy front derailleur to a Deore LX, my existing front derailleur is not compatible with this bike's tubing.). I like the old-fashioned stone simple mounting of the shifters on the down tube and the older 7 speed Hyperglide cassette (freewheel)...

This touring/commuting bike just keeps going. Yes, I did have cyclocross wheels put on and I recycled some nice components, but the basic bike was pretty fine.

It gets pathetically little maintenance, but it still runs.

I don't know what bikes are like today, but I assume they're equally fine. I can't justify a new one; I have three great bikes, including my 1976 Raleigh International,

a (hard fork!) 1988 Trek mountain bike and the Cannondale.

Bikes are good stuff. Spend a bit of money and get payback for fifty years.

AT&T and Google may give me hearburn, but a good bike is a joy forever.

Keystone XL, carbon sequestration, and the tax in the closet

The Keystone Pipeline XL (Keystone Expansion) is a part of  a multi-billion dollar project to "transport synthetic crude oil and diluted bitumen from the Athabasca Oil Sands in northeastern Alberta, Canada to refineries in Illinois and Oklahoma, and further to the U.S. Gulf Coast".

There is debate about the project, but the media coverage is hard to follow. That's because there is an "elephant in the room". (see - unspoken).

The elephant is carbon. If we taxed CO2 to offset the externalities of global climate change the Keystone XL would not be built and the existing Keystone pipeline would be dismantled. Of course if we had a Carbon tax the price of energy would rise about 10%, though that would be offset by the increasingly low costs of solar power.

It's easy to see why the media is missing the Keystone XL story. Without a Carbon Tax, or the regulatory equivalent, the Keystone XL makes business sense. A Carbon Tax, however, is a wee bit unpopular. It's easier for XL opponents to talk about other environmental impacts such as oil spills, water contamination and the like.

Of course once Keystone XL is built, instituting a carbon cost would mean dismantling a suddenly irrational multi-billion dollar investment. So maybe we should be talking about the real issue now.

It's a similar story with coal plant carbon sequestration. To the surprise of nobody whose paying attention, it's not happening. Shareholders would fire the CEO of a corporation that invested in carbon sequestration without either a carbon tax or the regulatory equivalent.

There's more than one elephant in this (too small) room. The other is Peak Oil, defined as the beginning of the end of the good stuff. It's gotten lost in the so-far-lesser depression, but our fracking and Keystone investments are consistent with Gwynne Dyer's 2008 prediction. We are now post-peak-oil.

Does it all make more sense now?

Yeah, I thought so.

There's a twist to this story though.

Is a Carbon Tax really all that unpopular? Governments need money to provide services an aging and increasing disabled population needs. There's no happy way to increase taxes. Compared to the alternatives, a Carbon Tax may not be as unpopular as we imagine. Maybe that's why nobody is talking about it. When politicians are forced to deal with big problems, they prefer to keep the real solutions behind closed doors.

The fear that's driving AT&T's smartphone data plan policies

AT&T, one of my least favorite vendors, raised our family mobile costs last week by about $450 a year. That's a risky thing to do to customers, as Netflix recently discovered.

Once I calmed down I tried to understand what motivated such a desperate move ...

Gordon's Notes: AT&T and the mandatory iPhone tax - even out of contract phones must pay

For about two years my son has used my old iPhone on our family plan. He has never had a contract and he doesn't have a data plan. The phone is configured not to use cellular data...

Today AT&T enrolled him in a mandatory data plan because "he has a smartphone". His text messaging stopped working, perhaps because his cellular data was turned off...

... [I think ... ] They are preparing for the end of their text messaging revenue stream.

They figure they can hold onto voice for a while; longer than most of us think. They do, however, expect Apple, Google, Facebook and others to steal text messaging. So in the short term they're getting as much money as they can out of text messaging, while ensuring every single customer has a data plan...

When I wrote that I hadn't read a GigaOm post from 11/3 ...

Operators better say goodbye to the SMS cash cow — Broadband News and Analysis

... The carrier cash cow of SMS text messaging is on the wane, driven by third-party messaging apps that include BlackBerry Messenger, iMessage, Skype and others. The trend was highlighted Thursday by Wireless Intelligence, which used data from Dutch mobile operator regulator OPTA ...

According to OPTA, the total number of SMS sent in the Netherlands stood at 5.7 billion for the first six months of the year, down 2.5 percent from 5.9 billion in 2H 2010, even though total SMS revenue rose slightly (0.6 percent) to EUR378 million during the period.,,,

... This year, AT&T changed its messaging plans to push new subscribers into an all-or-nothing price plan where they pay per text or pay up for unlimited. The bet is most people who weren’t on unlimited plans will find themselves paying more or getting stuck with insanely high bills for sending a few too many texts.

... That’s how AT&T is squeezing out the last bit of value from its cash cow, but it’s undoubtedly aware that such draconian measures or too-high-rates on the unlimited side might push people over to the third-party apps even faster. The downside to most of those apps is that users have to make sure their friends are also on the service, which can be complicated. For carriers, the downside is they are trading high-margin texting revenue for barely profitable data use.

So expect more texting and data plan changes, and a continued focus on machine-to-machine communications, as well as more apps that try to make third-party messaging across different platforms easier...

Turns out we're right on target then, because our response to AT&T's mandatory data plan/cost increase is to drop our $30/month unlimited texting plan (offsets price increase exactly) and switch to a combination of Facebook Messenger and Google Voice while disabling all texting [2]. As predicted, AT&T's moves are accelerating customer migration from their most profitable revenue stream.

See also:

• Gordon's Tech: Testing Facebook Messenger as a texting alternative (4 and 3G)
• Gordon's Tech: AT&T Smart Limits for Wireless is almost worthless
• Gordon's Notes: AT&T and the mandatory iPhone tax - even out of contract phones must pay

[1] If Apple were to make iMessage available as an app and independent of texting we'd go that way; we're still exploring options.
[2] AT&T is required to do that on request. They don't like to admit it's possible. Say you want "administrative texting only". We also dropped a $5/month "Smart Limits for Wireless" plan because that is useless with smarphone accounts. There are other responses that AT&T won't like. As long as we have to pay a data plan, we might as well get a contract too. That redirects AT&T's revenue to Apple, and let us make money by selling either the new or older phones.

The sharing challenge: access, topic and identity. Why G+ fails.

Setting aside the act of mass datacide that moved Google up my corporate evil scale, G+ suffers from a fundamental Circle problem. It may be an attempt to work around Facebook patents rather than a misguided design, but either way it doesn't work.

G+ provides these tools for publication and subscription:

• A single identity. (In this case, identity is equivalent to a maximal set of Identity-Circles + Public)
• Circle: both Access Control and Topic definition and Subscription-filter option
• Person level blocks

These aren't sufficient. They put far too much of a burden on the publisher to create and maintain a multitude of Circles that pre-coordinate Access Control and Topic definition [1]. The pre-coordination work fails due to combinatorial explosion [2].

A full set of controls looks like this.

• Multiple identity: where identity is a set of access controls and topic definitions.
• Access controls: who can see what.
• Topic definitions: what are the topics, so subscribers who can see a stream can choose what they follow within that stream
• Person blocks: hide all comments from a person

A full set of controls seems more complex, but the workload largely falls on the Publisher, not the consumer -- and the combinatorial explosion problem is resolved. Subscribers choose which topic to follow. Unfollowing all topics is equivalent to blocking a person's posts but not their comments.

Google Reader Social had no access controls (that I remember), but it did allow multiple identities (an identity is equivalent to a subset of topics). The topic controls were very weak (subscribe to tags - almost never used), but the UI made it very easy to pick items of interest from a large stream. The G+ UI makes the combinatorial problem much more significant.

Google has promised pseudonym support. That will be roughly equivalent to a subset operation on Circles. Boolean operations on Circles would also somewhat alleviate the publisher combinatorial problem.

Alleviate, but not eliminate. Sooner or later, G+ will need to separate access control from topic definition.

(I'm grateful to a G+ comment from Peter C that helped me think this through.)

[1] Note too the 3 people on earth who'd probably appreciate this. This is identical to the pre- and post-coordination problems that bedevil anyone who works with concept based knowledge representation ontologies, including clinical terminologies/vocabularies like SNOMED and (yech) ICD-10-CM and ICD-10-PCS.
[2] A Sept 2011 WSJ post on "injury by falling turtle" in ICD-10-CM causes of injury illustrates this also. See #1.

Gordon's scale of corporate evil - 3rd edition

Top end of the scale is 15. It's a linear scale.

My personal scale rates large for-profit corporations. CARE International is provided as a baseline measure and Philip Morris shall forever define the upper limits of corporate evil.

1. Philip Morris: 15
2. Exxon: 13
3. Goldman Sachs: 12
4. United Healthcare: 11
5. AT&T and Verizon (tied): 11
6. Facebook: 10
7. Google: 8
8. Average publicly traded company: 8
9. Microsoft: 7
10. Apple: 5
11. CARE International: 1 (They're not a PTC, so this is merely a non-evil reference point)What's your ranking?

There's been a lot of action since the 2009 1st edition. Google was once tied with Apple, but the manner and actions of the Reader affair moved them, for the first time, above Microsoft. They're heading into Facebook territory, even as Facebook itself is improving. AT&T and Verizon are slowly rising up the scale , breaking into the top five for the first time.

Conversely Microsoft has been relatively angelic over the past two years. They are incompetent, yes, but this is a scale of corporate evilness. Similarly Netflix is not so much evil as incompetent.

Apple, for all its sins, has stayed relatively low on the chart. They take our money, they mostly give us what we expect. They did nuke several customer services, but with a 1 year warning (vs. Google's 1 week warning before eliminating my shared reader items).

Some past editions for comparison:

• Gordon's Notes: Gordon's scale of corporate evil - 2nd edition(12/2010)
• Gordon's Notes: Gordon's scale of corporate evil - 1st edition (12/2009)

AT&T and the mandatory iPhone tax - even out of contract phones must pay

For about two years my son has used my old iPhone on our family plan. He has never had a contract and he doesn't have a data plan. The phone is configured not to use cellular data, it does have text messaging. He has data access only via wifi.

Today AT&T enrolled him in a mandatory data plan because "he has a smartphone". His text messaging stopped working, perhaps because his cellular data was turned off.

This was not completely unexpected, though AT&T's policy has been ambiguous when it came to off-contract customers ...

• Gordon's Notes: AT&T: In case you forget why you hate the company (but not the customer reps) (8/2011)
• Gordon's Notes: Does anyone know what AT&T's smartphone data plan rules really are? (8/2010)

I called AT&T, put his SIM card into his old phone and they said they'd remove the data plan. However, they haven't done it yet [1], the charge is still showing on our family bill. Instead of enrolling him in the lowest cost data plan, he was auto-enrolled in the highest cost plan - $26/month.

So not only are iPhones carrier-locked in the US, they also incur an unwanted data plan even when they cannot use any cellular data, even when the user has no subsidized phone, and even when the user has no contract.

I am having a very bad week with evil corporations. First Google, now AT&T. If I wasn't already an OWS fan I'd sign up.

I'm researching what will happen if I get an AT&T GoPhone package and swap the SIM card into the iPhone. If that works I'll take both of our kids off the family plan. With iOS 5 on my iPhone 4 we can also drop our family texting plan and simply pay per text. In the meantime I'll review the policies of Sprint, Verizon and anyone else.

AT&T has complicated my life, but perhaps we'll save some money.

For what it's worth, I have filed a complaint with Minnesota's Attorney General. Even with the help of CU I couldn't find a physical address to use for AT&T, though other companies are listed. Evidently they hide well. eHow has it: AT&T Mobility, 5565 Glenridge Connector, Atlanta, GA 30342. (I wouldn't be surprised if they've changed their address to avoid the law.)

[1] On a 2nd call I was told it would be reversed.

See also:

• How to File Consumer Complaints Against ATT Wireless | eHow.com
• Gordon's Tech: Giving your old iPhone to your kid: working around AT&T's mandatory data plan

Update 11/4/11: I've been ruminating on what AT&T is trying to do. I think they have a rational goal, which they are pursuing in the blundering and inept manner of almost all publicly traded corporations.

They are preparing for the end of their text messaging revenue stream.

They figure they can hold onto voice for a while; longer than most of us think. They do, however, expect Apple, Google, Facebook and others to steal text messaging. So in the short term they're getting as much money as they can out of text messaging, while ensuring every single customer has a data plan. They can't get away with mandating a data plan for a dumb phone customer, but they would do that if they could manage the outrage.

Eventually they'll give up on text messaging entirely, and make do with data plan revenue. That transition may be painful, so they'll try anything they can imagine to increase data plan usage.

Update 11/23/11: Our Attorney General sent a letter to AT&T, which prompted a call to my home from a member of their "executive response team". Nice to know they have some sensitivity to these kinds of actions. I'll schedule a discussion with them.