Hawk's Babble-Log

I arranged to meet with Kevin, 818-306-0306, to buy a new cell phone, but he never showed. He did, however, text me and get me to wait around another hour. For nothing. Boo, Kevin! You suuck!

I arranged to meet with Joe, 818-612-7370, to buy a new cell phone, but he never showed. Boo, Joe! You stood me up!

If you are in the LA area and are looking to buy a phone off one of these guys, you’re going to be disappointed. You will set up an appointment and a meeting place, but they will not show up. You’ll find you have wasted a great deal of time.

Apparently, they do not want your money. They just want to waste your time (and your gas).

I’d like to make you a business offer.

Seriously. This is a real offer. In fact, you really can’t turn me down, as you’ll come to understand in a moment…

Here’s the deal. You’re going to start a business or expand the one you’ve got now. It doesn’t really matter what you do or what you’re going to do. I’ll partner with you no matter what business you’re in – as long as it’s legal.

But I can’t give you any capital – you have to come up with that on your own. I won’t give you any labor – that’s definitely up to you. What I will do, however, is demand you follow all sorts of rules about what products and services you can offer, how much (and how often) you pay your employees, and where and when you’re allowed to operate your business. That’s my role in the affair – to tell you what to do.

Now in return for my rules, I’m going to take roughly half of whatever you make in the business each year. Half seems fair, doesn’t it? I think so. Of course, that’s half of your profits.

You’re also going to have to pay me about 12% of whatever you decide to pay your employees because you’ve got to cover my expenses for promulgating all the rules about who you can employ, when, where, and how. Come on, you’re my partner. It’s only “fair.”

Now… after you’ve put your hard-earned savings at risk to start this business, and after you’ve worked hard at it for a few decades (paying me my 50% or a bit more along the way each year), you might decide you’d like to cash out – to finally live the good life.

Whether or not this is “fair” – some people never can afford to retire – is a different argument. As your partner, I’m happy for you to sell whenever you’d like… because our agreement says if you sell, you have to pay me an additional 20% of whatever the capitalized value of the business is at that time.

I know… I know… you put up all the original capital. You took all the risks. You put in all the labor. That’s all true. But I’ve done my part, too. I’ve collected 50% of the profits each year. And I’ve always come up with more rules for you to follow each year. Therefore, I deserve another, final 20% slice of the business.

Oh… and one more thing…

Even after you’ve sold the business and paid all my fees… I’d recommend buying lots of life insurance. You see, even after you’ve been retired for years, when you die, you’ll have to pay me 50% of whatever your estate is worth.

After all, I’ve got lots of partners and not all of them are as successful as you and your family. We don’t think it’s “fair” for your kids to have such a big advantage. But if you buy enough life insurance, you can finance this expense for your children.

All in all, if you’re a very successful entrepreneur… if you’re one of the rare, lucky, and hard-working people who can create a new company, employ lots of people, and satisfy the public… you’ll end up paying me more than 75% of your income over your life. Thanks so much.

I’m sure you’ll think my offer is reasonable and happily partner with me… But it doesn’t really matter how you feel about it because if you ever try to stiff me – or cheat me on any of my fees or rules – I’ll break down your door in the middle of the night, threaten you and your family with heavy, automatic weapons, and throw you in jail.

That’s how civil society is supposed to work, right? This is Amerika, isn’t it?

That’s the offer Amerika gives its entrepreneurs. And the idiots in Washington wonder why there are no new jobs…

Regards,

Porter Stansberry
http://www.stansberryresearch.com/

Look at this ad:

What’s the message here? To me, it seems like they are trying to tell me something about their network. Something like how much bandwidth I can use on their network. The word “UNLIMITED”, for example, tells me that I might be able to use their network as much as I want.

Now let’s look at the fine print:

Oh, look! The “UNLIMITED” plan includes 2000 Megs / month!

Wait a second here… it’s an “UNLIMITED” plan… and it includes 2000 Megs / month? How, exactly, does that make sense?

Seems like it’s an “UNLIMITED” plan with limits. But if it’s an “UNLIMITED” plan with limits, then it’s not UNLIMITED! I call false advertising!

It all started when I decided to shop around for other DSL providers.

Was I dissatisfied with my current DSL provider? Yes, I was. My DSL provider at the time was DSL Extreme. They had been ripping me off for some time, charging me more than the advertised price on their homepage. They will rip you off if they get the chance, and don’t even bother calling them up to talk about it as you won’t be able to talk to anyone at the office. Instead, your call will go to India or somewhere else. If you decide to cancel, you can’t just call ‘em up and cancel. There is no “Cancel my Account” link on their website, either. No, you have to write a letter and mail it to the head office (the one without a phone number). DSL Extreme is the worst company I’ve ever had to deal with.

Anyway, AT&T decided to cut off my current provider. Why did they do this? That’s a long story. Let me see if I can sum it up briefly:
1) Called up AT&T to ask about static IPs on their DSLs, spoke with a guy who said he could add a static IP on my account for $15 extra / month. I decided to go with that. He had to hang up and said he would call me back. He never called me back.
2) Next day, spoke to someone else who said that no, I could not have static IPs on my account unless I switch my order to a business DSL for over double the cost. I canceled the order. The next day I verified that the order had been canceled and that no one was going to cut off my existing DSL.
3) AT&T cut off my existing DSL anyway (on the “activation date”).
4) I tried to get DSL Extreme to turn me back on, but they wouldn’t talk to me. This is documented in my blog. It’s actually about twice as bad as what is currently documented in my blog as I decided to not write up every call. I burned through most of my 1,100 rollover minutes with DSL Extreme and got nowhere.
5) I realized DSL Extreme wasn’t going to do anything, so I signed up on the original account with AT&T, called U-verse Internet (no static IPs).
6) Had to wait another week for a new “activation date” before service was turned on. This is a silly arbitrary. They could have turned me on way before that. And I was ready way before that, too. But they wouldn’t do it. Even when I called and asked.
7) When the activation date finally rolled around, it still didn’t work. Had to call a tech to go out there and “check the line” and all that stuff. He installed another terminal outlet (said I was sharing my line with another apartment) and gave me a new DSL modem.
Now I’m online, but with a really crappy connection.

From day one with AT&T U-verse Internet, the connection was crappy. Sometimes, pages loaded. Sometimes, the site was not found at all (DNS failure). Sometimes, half the page would load. Sometimes, the page HTML would load, but then the CSS would not load. Sometimes, the images wouldn’t load. Sometimes the javascript wouldn’t load. In short, a really crappy network connection.

And this crappy network was 24/7. For weeks!

I thought maybe it was my new gigabit switch, so I swapped it out with an older switch, but that didn’t help. I swapped out cables in the hope it was a bad cable, but that didn’t help either. I swapped out AT&T’s shiny new Linksys with my old one, but that didn’t help either. I called AT&T support, but they had no clue what to do about it, so they sent a tech out to fix it.

The tech thought it was because I was on a different internal IP set, 10.x.x.x instead of 192.168.x.x. No, that wasn’t it. But the guy wouldn’t help me if I didn’t do it his way, so I re-set all my internal IPs to 192.168.1.x with DHCP. Still a crappy connection. We tried plugging my laptop directly in to the DSL modem, but it was still crappy. It worked well for a while, but then it reverted back to the same degraded performance.

Finally, he gets some help from someone who knows more than he does and we go in to the DSL modem’s advanced config screen and change one setting from the default “Yes” to “No”. Or was it “No” to “Yes”? Anyway…

BAM! Perfect internet access! When I say “perfect”, I mean solid, no errors, and good response times. Websites load fully, all CSS, all javascript, all images, etc. It’s still not as fast as the advertised speed, but at least I’m back online!!! Yayyy!

I put all my internal IPs back to 10.x.x.x. Next will be to plug in all the cables and connections like they were.

Now if only I could get my static IP back. Then I could get back in through the firewall at work.

Boo! AT&T, you suuuck!

It seems that, starting this month, AT&T will start imposing limits on bandwidth usage:
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/04/att-broadband-caps/

But to make matters worse, AT&T can’t even keep track! They’ve been caught red-handed over-billing! Check out this report:
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/113442

Now that I have AT&T U-verse Internet, I’ll be watching this like a hawk! (pun intended)