I didn’t hold the highest opinion of Time Warner Cable before, but lately they’ve sunk to a new low.  They want to start introducing bandwidth caps on users but they can’t do this for existing customers who signed up for unlimited internet.  So what do they do?  They offer a new “deal” where you can get cable, internet, and digital phone service for a “locked-in rate” for a year.  Buried in the fine print is the fact that you’d also be signing up for a bandwidth cap.  Even worse, the afore-mentioned locked-in rate requires you to sign a contract for a year of service.  So if you found out after the fact that your bandwidth was capped, you’d have to pay a $150 early-termination fee to get out of the contract.

What is even more ridiculous is that the limit is set at 20GB per month.  When I first read about the 20GB limit, I thought surely that is per day.  That I could live with.  The only way you’re likely to use 20GB a day is if you’re downloading torrents constantly (which I still say is none of their business—courts have already ruled that the ISP is not responsible for what users do on their network).  But 20GB a month is very easy to reach even if you’re not pirating anything, especially if you watch TV online, or if you use VOIP (i.e. Vonage, Skype).  It’s almost as if Time Warner’s internet department has some financial incentive to limit competition from Time Warner’s cable TV and digital phone departments!  No, that’s just crazy talk.

You’ve probably heard before that the mo money we come across, the mo problems we see (Wallace 1997).  While that may be the case when mo money is acquired posthumously, statisticians and economists now have evidence that your happiness is proportional to the logarithm of your wealth (see chart below).  In other words, sadness is for poor people!  The corollary is that the more money you currently have, the more you would have to acquire in order to attain an additional happiness unit.  Much like crack cocaine.

See also a more formal paper about this topic.  I didn’t read it because it looked super boring, but the charts at the end are interesting.  For instance, did you know there is a “U-shaped life satisfaction in rich English-speaking countries”? (Figure 5)

Well, not quite.  But I was mentioned in a post on the Freakonomics site, which is now hosted on NYTimes.com.  I e-mailed them a link last week, which they proceeded to blog about.  But I didn’t expect my full name to show up in bold text or anything.  Kinda cool though I guess.

If you’re like me you knew there was a writers’ strike but didn’t really understand what it was about.  It finally made sense to me after reading about it on Jenna Fischer’s blog and watching the YouTube video she links to, which shows Greg Daniels, Ryan, Kelly, Mose, and Toby on the picket line (they are all writers on the show).

The gist of it is that contracts were written in a time before the Internet and before TV shows were sold on DVD.  So when someone watches a show on NBC.com, for example, the network considers that promotional material and gets to keep nearly all the ad revenue (whereas the writers/actors get paid whenever a show is rerun on TV).  Similarly, the networks keep nearly all the proceeds of DVD sales.  Ten years from now, digital downloads and DVDs could very likely be the main ways people watch television shows, and it’s not exactly fair that the networks get to keep all that cash for themselves.

And if that’s wrong, then I guess I still don’t understand it after all.

Joel (as in, on software) made some predictions on his blog yesterday as to where the state of development on the web is going and why he thinks Google’s AJAX-y apps could be troublesome for the company if they don’t adapt well.  I’m not so sure about all that, especially since it is easier to adapt on the web than it was for off-the-shelf business software written in 1989.  Plus I don’t see any web/JavaScript platform becoming as ubiquitous as C++.  But he makes his point well and it’s an interesting read.  Maybe in three or four years we’ll realize he was right.  And if he is right, could this be a second coming of Yahoo?  YUI currently seems to be the most financially backed JavaScript/CSS “platform” of the type that Joel is mentioning, even if it isn’t the most popular right now.  Something interesting to ponder.

I don’t understand why WarioWare: Smooth Moves costs the same as Twilight Princess.  WarioWare is kinda fun when you have people over or something, but not fifty dollars worth of fun.  Plus, have you seen the graphics?  Seriously that game couldn’t have taken more than two months for a team of like two programmers an artist and a helper monkey to create, whereas Twilight Princess had a three year development cycle or something.  Why do the casual games cost the same as the serious games?

I may pick up WarioWare used in a year, when it’s like fifteen bucks.  But not new for fifty.  At least Wii Play is only ten dollars (kind of).

If the subject of this post was a little too cryptic for you, it’s my pseudo-enigmatic way of saying “taxes.”  Does anyone know much about doing taxes?  I know it’s possible to do your own taxes, but... is it hard?  I mean, I got an A in three calculuses (calculi?), I should be able to handle it, right?  My parents used an accountant as far back as I remember, but my dad also owns his own business and so his taxes were a bit more complicated.  Mine should be pretty simple, I just have one income source, and the only deduction is the money I tithe to the church I guess.  Oh and I’m married, and supposedly one of the things George W. did before he started bombing the middle east was to get rid of the so-called “marriage tax.”  But I don’t know what that means or if it actually changed anything or if it was just a talking point.  I guess my biggest concern about doing it myself would be that I might do it wrong and get sent to jail for tax evasion or something when it was really just tax ignorance.  I’d also be afraid that I’m missing some refunds I could apply for or deductions I could take that would save me more money than an accountant charges.

Any comments from the audience?

I bring forth two topics of discussion on this grim mid-January day.  First, I built a new PC last week.  Here is a picture of that process that Stephanie captured.  Notice as Punky eagerly awaits the opportunity to chew on any part I do not need.  This was my first time building a whole PC, which wasn’t very difficult.  I thought I had destroyed my processor though.  All you ever hear is how incredibly sensitive the processor is, but once you get the clasp closed down on it, it is pretty much indestructible.  I learned this while trying to mount the cooling fan on the processor.. which involved applying a sizeable percentage of my full body weight to the “snap-in” mounting screws.  But other than that, and the fact that I forgot to put in the shield around the connectors on the back and had to unmount the motherboard to put it in, everything went pretty well.

Second, I am going to discuss Windows Live Local (found, cryptically enough, at local.live.com).  It’s Microsoft’s latest way to compete with Google (specifically, Google Maps).  So far, it’s got the immediate advantage of making much prettier maps.  It also has satellite data of course.  The photos around Charlotte are older than Google’s, but they also have some black and white photos that cover my hometown in a pretty high resolution (albeit without color), where Google just says “no satellite imagery available at this zoom level.”  I guess I should try to get to a point here.  I don’t normally like to side with the “I hate Microsoft because they’re successful” techno-hippies.  If you want to read blogs about that, you don’t have to look very hard.  I’m going to objectively and open-mindedly suggest to you that perhaps Microsoft sucks.  Proof of this theorem is left as an exercise for the reader.

I guess what I’m addressing specifically is Microsoft’s “throw money at the latest tech trend until we have at least ninety percent market share” strategy.  I’m really amazed at the economics of it.. ya know, that it actually works.  I mean, look at what they did to Netscape seven years ago.  And that was competition for lead market share for a piece of software that they give away for free, without any kind of embedded advertising.

The inspiration for this whole blog post is this comment I read in an interview EGM had with Bill Gates (well, the interview was actually with Peter Moore, the Bill Gates thing was a sidebar):

EGM: Microsoft has lost roughly $1 billion a year on the first Xbox since it launched. Was that worth it?

Bill Gates: We knew going into the original Xbox that we would lose...a lot. Or you can say, invest a lot—that’s the nice way to say that. And we knew the only thing we’d get out of that first generation was the learning and credibility that came with that experience.

Read the whole article here.

Can you imagine if you were owner of a company and you told your shareholders “Our strategy this year is to release a product that loses a billion dollars a year, for the next five years.  Then maybe we’ll start to turn a profit.”  I mean, even if you’re Microsoft, a billion dollars is still a pretty significant sum of money.

So give me all your poison

I’ve recently purchased my own car insurance for the first time in my life.  Before now I was always just on my parents’ policy.  Now that I’m supposedly an adult (so they say), I shopped around for policies.  I’ve started to understand why Ned Flanders considers insurance a form of gambling.  You can pay this much a year, and if you get in a wreck you get this much.  But pay just a little bit more, and you get way more than that if you get in a wreck.

Here’s the thought process:
What are the odds that I will get in a wreck?  I mean, I pass cars on the road all of the time, most of them are not wrecked.  Well I suppose it could happen.. maybe.  We could fix the car with a five dollar check from Bob’s Brand Insurance, right?  Well maybe not.  Maybe we need more.  Do you think the Camry is worth 75k?  Yeah, lets insure it for that much.  Wait, what about bodily injury insurance.  Nothing in my body will ever cost more than 10k to fix, right?  More?  Maybe we need seven and a half digits on that figure.  How’s that look?  Five thousand dollars a year premium??  Well maybe we don’t need to insure the XBox behind one of the fifteen inch subs.

And so forth and so on.  No matter what happens, the house always wins.

Marge: I’m sure your insurance will cover the house.
Maude: Uh, well, no.  Neddy doesn’t believe in insurance.  He considers it a form of gambling.

  --The Simpsons: “Hurricane Neddy” (Episode 4F07)