Last summer I exercised my free market choices but dumping cable tv service from Comcast and switching to Dish Network Satellite TV. Comcast was pushing $90 a month for cable TV so I just shut it off and went without TV for a few months. It was summer so I wasn’t watching TV anyway. Once football season started back up I decided to re-up for service. Satellite proved to be a much more affordable option at $40 compared to Comcast which was almost $90 for equivalent service. I see the main reason for this as neither Dish or Direct TV have a government granted monopoly like Comcast does. However since there are still only two players in the satellite market I found out there is little market pressure from having fair contracts. Unlike many mobile phone contracts that have a fixed base price over the term of the contract, Dish can change the base price of their service and still hold you to the terms of the contract. This is of course because you don’t get to negotiate the terms of the contract. Its a one size fits contract that is sign only by the customer.
I found this out for myself last December when Dish jacked the base price up after I was four months into the contract. I let them have it over the phone about what a “contract” was supposed to be. In my mind the contract says “I’ll guarantee I’ll be your customer for two years if you guarantee you don’t raise your prices for two years.” They didn’t budge on the contract issue but I was however able to get them to credit the difference of the price increase for the next 12 months. I was pretty sure Dish had the appropriate weasel words in their contract so I took the compromise even thought it would leave me paying a little extra on the back eight months of the contract. So I’m doing my free market duty to inform the public that Dish TV contracts are worthless. The extra $50 that dish will pull out this deal will result in me bad mouthing Dish to everyone I know for being weasels. If you are a new customer ask to sign up without a contract purchase your own receiver if you’d like if you want to go no contract. If you are an existing customer do not resign up for you contract when it expires. It will not guarantee pricing. Also see if you can get that 12 month credit while its available. If you do sign a contract cross out the sections you disagree with and try to get a Dish employee to sign it like a real contract would be.
Also you are a customer that took advantage of the free Cinemax for a year for allow them to automatically bill your credit card be sure to reverse that after 12 months and can back to making them send you a bill. Make them reoffer you something for the privileged of being able to automatically bill you.
I’ll have more comments on this as I learn more about the situation. Word is that on March 9th Candia Police and the SPCA took 12 horses from a Brian Travis’s Candia horse farm. So far no charges have been filled and there is no indication that any charges will be filled. They just took the horses.
Finding real facts on this case has been difficult so far. The Union Leader newspaper does have a story on this finally. The discussion board is getting pretty heated on both sides.
Although I do not know these people personally I have heard from others that these horses were all in healthy condition and that there was an ongoing vendetta against the owners of the farm. The other rumor is the “anonymous call” about the owners not having a proper horse structure was made by the wife a horse structure builder. The owner’s had decided to build their own horse structure rather than pay for a contractor to build them. The claim was that health certificate for the horses was not on file with the New Hampshire. He had it for Colorado but not New Hampshire.
List of People and Organizations colluding with this raid.
Michael McGillen Chief of Candia Police 603-483-2318
Steven Sprowl, Manager, Field Services Division Office, SPCA
work: 603-772-2921 ext. 111
cell: 603-674-9836
Currently no other parties can be identified because they duct taped over their license plates and farm names.
Well the game was a lot closer than I thought it would be. All and all a good game. Outside of the 100 yard interception the first three quarters were kinda dull but of course sometimes good defence plays out that way. Although Warner did have one mistake I think he helped his chances of getting into the hall of fame, This was the first time I’ve seen Fitzgerald play. The kid is good, I think he’ll be a top WR for a good number of years. Commercials sucked this year. The Doritos ones were the old decent ones. That and the rude box of flowers but I don’t even remember of the name of the company. The Sobe one was retarded again.
Here’s is another example of another good intentioned “for the children” law that I believe will only further a police state. This new bill would require that cell phone cameras make a noise when they are used to take a picture. Last week a handcuffed Oscar Grant was leathly shot in the back by a BART police officer. The event was witness by dozens of onlookers and make of which record the event on video using there cell phone camera. The BART cops were trying to confiscate cell phone cameras of onlookers that took pictures of BART cop Johannes Mehserle murdering Oscar Grant who was handcuffed on the ground. If those people with cell phone cameras were not there, Johannes Mehserle would not be getting charged with murder. The thin blue line would be covering up the murder and claim that Oscar Grant was resisting arrest. As far as I am concern all of the cops that were trying to confiscate phones should also be tried for accessory to murder after the fact. Right now cameras used by citizens seem to be the only effective means of stopping police brutality. Legislating that phones click will have a chilling effect on citizens exposing police brutality. Perverts will just use a normal cameras or old cell phones to do what they want to do.
Well we are midway into January and the pellet stove has been in use for a month and a half now so its a good time to reflect on heating my house with pellets. The Stove I got is an Englander 25 something. Lowes, Home Depot and Ace all send the same stove under different brand names for around $1,800. It works well enough so far. Back in the fall of 2008 when I purchased the stove, #2 heating oil had rocketed up to $4.59 a gallon. At that price, it would be cheaper to purchase a low end pellet stove and four tons of pellets than it was to heat my house with oil that winter. The return on investment would have been less than one winter. However, with the meltdown of the stock market and the price of crude oil in October the price of #2 heating oil has dropped down to $2.19 a gallon. This knocked the ROI out to several years.
The stove itself was pretty cheap and easy to install. It weighs 375 pounds so I did need a hand moving it into position. It was under $250 for the 3″ double walled exhaust pipe and 2″ flexible air intake hose. I plumbed them straight out the wall. I had to throw in an extra 90 pipe in order to meet code and be 4 feet from a window. Protecting the wood floor from the heat and weight took a $50 stove board.
One thing I am disappointed in is the heat output. When I went shopping around I did it based on the square footage which was rated for 2,220 sq ft. A lot of the higher end brands are much smaller and rated for 1,500 to 1,800 square feet but put out 35,000 BTUs. With the exceptions of the efficiency rating card Englander convently didn’t market the fact that it only puts out 24,000 BTU. You get what you pay for though. It will make a perfect pellet stove for the garage once I get that insulated. The other complaint I have is the hopper. Even though it hold 60 pounds of pellets a good 20 pounds of them will get stucks on the side so you have to push them down by hand.
Performance wise it does maintain the temperature in my poorly insulated house. The blow and heat range can be set from 1-9 and if I have it on a higher setting the house stays warm even on zero degree nights. As good as it performs it doesn’t replace my oil burning boiler. The Boiler is rate for 115K BTU and can heat the house up quick. The pellet stove takes a lot longer.
For the rah rah made in the USA factor, the stove was made in Virginia and all of the pellets where produced in the USA. Three tons of the pellets I purchased where from West Oregon Wood and the fourth ton was made by Pennington which is also a US based company. I know West Oregon Wood gets there wood locally as Oregon is a big logging state but I’m less sure about Pennington. Pellets were scare last fall so I could really be picky. For those that don’t know pellets made largely from sawdust which typically would have been a waste product of the logging industry. As for the green factor pellets do burn more efficiently than wood or coal but no quite as efficient as oil/gas/propane. So even thought pellets burn a little dirtier I feel they are a better option than oil because they are a renewable resource and a domestic resource. By switching to pellets swinging the trade deficit about three thousand dollars to employ people in the US rather funneling cash to overseas.
I’m really not a journal kinda person but lately I’ve been finding myself wishing I had a photographic memory. I do have a pretty crackerjack memory already but, I’m also greedy and still wish I could pack ever many more bits of information into my cranium in the hopes I could find uses for it. What was going through my head in during the run up to the Iraq war? What I thinking just before the market crash in October? How awesome was it to be in the of middle Beerworks next to Fenway when the Sox broke the curse in ‘04? Since I’m also lazy I’m putting this online using wordpress so I don’t have to go digging for a notebook. Hell, I can even update it from my phone now. If my friends want to pop in and comments on my thoughts, ramblings, and rants then hopefully their comments will give it more context and different views which is all good.
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." -George Santayana