Tag Archives: ripoff

Removing the penny was a bad idea and a scam.

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In the year 2026 we bid farewell to the penny, But was the death of this penny warranted? I say no. Others will say yes and scream and stomp their feet saying “It CoSts 3.7 cents to make!” While this is a factual number i am going to call bullshit on this. There are more factors in the penny that make that 3.7 sound expensive but in reality the real cost of a penny is a fraction.

Pennies in of themselves are not a one time use commodity. If you have pennies laying around check the dates on them. More times than not you will find pennies that are 10+ years old. But is removing the penny logical? No…

Removing the penny from the currency system will inherently will not save any money for the average consumer. moreover, It will cost Americans much more than ever. Going forward with the elimination of the penny corporations and their products are suppose to round the prices to the nearest nickel. I really do not think they will use this logic at all. They will go for the greedy approach and round right to the next dime. This is an automatic Gift to companies. They will part out everything and charge you through the ass for the product.

Imagine a device made of 37 small parts, each costing 3 cents.

  • Actual Cost: $1.11
  • Fair Rounding: $1.10
  • Corporate “Creative” Rounding: They’ll price each part individually at $0.10, turning a $1.11 product into a $3.70 expense.

Do i trust companies to do the right thing? Absolutely not! They will use methodology to make a bigger profit and scale their prices to make rounding in their favor. Companies are out there and they are not in the business to make humanity better. they are out to screw the consumers for the benefits of the shareholder. Do I believe every company will do this? No, they will start out honest at first but, once profits take a dive, they will use creative rounding in order to scale profits. Because why Improve when you can use some magic rounding and make a huge profit. I’ve made an example below to show how rounding can run away with pricing!

Calculation MethodPrice for 37 PartsPercent Increase
Original Cost ($0.03/part)$1.11—
Total Price Rounded (Fair)$1.10-0.9% (Small loss)
Nickel Rounding (Per Part)$1.8560% Increase
Scam Corp Rounding ($0.10/part)$3.70233.3% Increase

As you can see, this is not only bad but it can be completely destructive. But i digress I’ve strayed a little bit here. The statement a penny costs 3.7 cents is a shortsighted idea. Lets look at the penny. Does it magically disappear if it is used? No. Does it break easy? No! is the penny reusable? YES! A penny can stay in circulation for up to 25 years and be reused up to 2500 times. if the penny was a one time use device it would be a terrible thing! we’d be using more resources than it costs. but the penny in a year can be used 100 times. So lets break the costs down. since a new penny is not needed after use we can spread these costs. If we are to break this costs per used the penny is actually a very cost effective device.

If we say a penny is used 100 times in a given year in the first year the cost of this penny is actually closer to 0.037 Cents ! If we go for the average lifetime of a penny (25 years) 0.000148 cents. the cost analysis here shows the penny to come out on top, It’s worth it to keep. Why hide the penny? it can account for stealth inflation that hides inflation by elimination lower currencies to make it look like efficiency.

The Bottom Line: The “3.7 cents to manufacture” argument is shortsighted. Killing the penny isn’t about efficiency; it’s about stealth inflation. By eliminating the smallest unit of currency, we make it easier for corporations to hide price hikes and “round” their way into your retirement fund.

The price of coffee and you.

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About 3 years ago the price of coffee went up in all the coffee places around, which was understandable due to the market price of coffee went through the fucking roof.  now that the markets are going back up yet again chains are putting there coffee prices slightly higher, the problem is the prices never went back down when the price of coffee (commodity) went down.93b697f3caee4a86d9e698bf9d3fbac4Yes the prices have jumped for year 2014 but look at the price in 2011 , we should of seen a decrease in those prices. I know someone will say BUT WHAT ABOUT ALL THE OTHER PRICES. Oil has stayed somewhat stable but what ever the fuck they do to increase on that is always a mystery, its like someone goes “SHIT the suns out SOMEONE INCREASE GAS PRICES QUICK!” . Milk prices are slightly up and there is a multitude of reasons for that that could get its own post, but considering the milk to coffee ratio it would have a lesser effect on the total price.

Funny-Money-45A lot of the times companies find the easy way to raise the price of things is “insert random thing happening here to a small portion of the total that really doesn’t have on effect on the thing in question”. Bob shit himself again.. RAISE PRICES! of all the times I’ve read about oil refinery fires and how they are going to spike gas prices , doing a little research you find out that said refinery is only responsible for 0.1% of total fuel production, that makes you go WTF are they making there?  It seems every other commodity market has gone into the practice of manufactured disasters or some sort of market manipulation to increase prices.

 

CWT financed ten rounds of herd retirements from 2003 to 2010, during which CWT was responsible for removing over 500,000 cows from production, reducing the nation’s milk supply by approximately 10 billion pounds…. By the end of the program in 2010, it was responsible for a cumulative increase in milk price revenue of $9.55 billion.

That resulted in a class action suit for price fixing. Since its not about supply and demand, its more over about money and more money.  So at this point I’ll stick to making my coffee at home.

 

Wells Fartgo and the idoits who run it and shake down old people.

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It’s been awhile since i have typed up something on here and I’ve made it a point to catch up and get something on here.  I’ve been dealing with a mortgage company from hell or pretty close to it and, it does take a lot of time.   I’ve tried to reason with this company , I’ve tried pleading , I’ve even tried to get them to realize this mortgage was flawed from the inception. It’s gone to the point of throwing lawyers at the bank and seeing if they will listen, Ironically they are trying to play deaf, dumb and, blind to said lawyers.  Rather than replying to any request the lawyer sends out they in turn reply to us and try to scare the hell out of the people in this house by sending people to “check if the property is occupied” it is alright.

The first instance of these so called inspectors ended up with a man trespassing on to the property and recanting on how he “beat his son and went to jail for breaking his arm”.  he’d also went on about responsibilities and such to my mother, I was not home at the time and It only was made known a few days later to me.  Now fuckstick stuff like that and being a representative of a large company hiring thugs sounds like something out of a movie plot that Brian De Palma would direct. That said alone it is a threatening posture to take . he Was told to leave the property and while being told he continued to keep taking pictures of the yard inside the yard and inside the garage. Now I don’t take nicely to people trespassing on my property nor masked threats, You don’t treat people like they are shit nor to you recant your life as a criminal when you’re representing a company. Calls to wells fargo went unanswered or passed off to different departments, and treated as if it did not happen.

The Second incident took place Not more than a month later. Again a person trespassed into the yard and was either looking around or otherwise , When confronted he went to his car and sat in the car with the windows up, when confronted the person would not identify who they are and what they were doing. After a momment that person put down there window and said “HI” and than pulled out almost hitting the person trying to get some identification from this person to who and what they were doing, since all they leave on the house is an envelope with a phone number in it. unknown to asshat whom almost hit someone he has been caught on camera and pictures exist of the incident.

I was livid and called the number in the envelope and asked when since wells fargo was trying to corner the market on murder, to which the person said sorry and said there was nothing that could be done since it was a third party , My ass…. They are hired by wells fargo and they control what these little droids do.  Its nothing short of bullying and scare tactics in order to scare the people whom have mortgages with the company, I’ve fought my way through this and if i even started on the fraud that wells fargo has done I’d have to rename this site Wellfargofraud.net.

It has got to the point where if i call my own mortgage company they will not talk to me in ANY details about anything other than pay us money , if you want information from us its Subpoena only.  I was forced on to the mortgage, I was defrauded on the Initial application and since 2008 I’ve been trying to confront this issue to which wells fargo(wacovia) has categorically ignored any and all communication from me and will only talk to my mother.  to this end I’ve sacrificed almost any credit i have in order to keep this house due to this scam of a loan.  Wells Fargo/Wachovia/World Financial has got away with defrauding almost every American out there and with the foreclosure fraud settlement they have basically got away with murder without as much as a slap on the wrist.  36 billion is a drop in a bucket the size of china when it comes to how much they have invested into derivatives / oil / securities and everything else.

I could write all the issues i’ve been having in this post but I think I’d overrun the internets bandwidth in doing so with this company and how they treat people. So I will save it for another couple of posts….

 

Call of deluded Elite premium ? wtf.

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With the advent of DLC’s game publishers are getting more and more ridiculous with content and how its presented to its user base.  I hate microtransactions with games and they are becoming mainstream to the point they are worthless to what they add to the game and making the games themselves worthless.

As publishers tap this as a primary income source games loose alot of there content because the game release often is hobbled to the point of being a few hours long and content running out in the first 5 hours.  Often now you see unfinished games released with Day 1 DLC’s that fill in holes in the game that were made by short cutting the game and putting these pieces of a game behind a pay wall.

My friend picked up call of duty MW3 and i noticed that right on the box they were pushing for picking up something called Call of Duty elite premium  and I wondered. What is it? its basically a $50 dollar limited license to the future content and a bunch of crap that was either free or was in games in the past.

Looking quickly over what you get with this “service”

3. Analyze & Improve Your Performance

Access Guides to Maps, Weapons, Killstreaks, Perks, and Equipment

Most games before COD ussaully have some sort of stats tracking , Hell Unreal tournament had this kind of stat tracking back in December 1999 . That 11 years before COD, Sure this is still on the free end of the elite but, what the hell, I know they are going to say but this costs money to track on a server etc etc etc. Not really since it takes all of ten miliseconds and a few lines of code to say l33tk4lla killed soandso.

4. Customize your load outs & sync DIRECTLY to the game

WHY? if you at work trying to think about how to kill someone in a game and you’re bored shitless likely its not going to work.

onwards to ..

7. THEATER

Free Premium

  • Upload & Share 30 Second HD Videos Online
There’s this thing.. I forget what its called. Yewtub yooboob. younoob? OH YOUTUBE, yeah thats it.
Needless function.
Than you hit the paywall

10. MW3 DOWNLOADABLE CONTENT*, INCLUDING ALL THE MW3 MAPS

Premium

  • More Content than Ever, with 20 Pieces of New MW3 DLC Premium
  • New monthly DLC released over 9 months, so you Always have Something New to Play Premium
  • More Variety than Ever, with New MP Maps, Spec Ops, Missions, Game Modes & More Premium
  • You get to keep all the DLC even if your membership expires. Premium

This is what is annoying. Likely all this material was fleshed out waaaay before the release of the game so they will keep dropping it on players to keep the “interest of players” up, there’s a tell tale sign that this content is either done or was near done when Call of Duty was released.

Read it carefully ….. 20 pieces of …. New monthly DLC over 9 months… new game  modes.  basically they announced they have this DONE and set to be dripped out to the user base as slow as possible to keep interest in the game rather than have a finished product.  Since the announcement is in finite numbers rather than speculative, which means they either cut this from the game or made a decision to leave this from the game.

DLC type content is an excuse to release a half finished game and get 3x the money for it. If you look at the cost of MW3 its pretty much over a 100$ for a complete game since the shelf life for these games are limited to about 12 months at most.

In the past games were given free content to keep interest or letting people mod the games to their hearts content . Now if you mod a game to have more fun its pretty much going to get you banned from the game. These games now come with FREE planned obsolescence .

What happened with games we could play to our hearts content and Not worry if EA or someone will shut down an aspect of the game or software that therefor makes the product unusable , They Should be forced to put some sort of patch into games that have to connect to servers that multiplayer still works on a connection without the need for servers in the middle. Direct connect games used to be common but they are hard to find these days without some sort of hoops to jump through.

Basically if this gets ground… game will continue down this bad path and players will suffer at the hands of the producers of this crap.

My guess is when COD 10 is release and you want to play COD MW3 for old time sake you will try to play and get “CONNECTION REFUSED” and be stuck with the Disc that now serves as your coffee cup coaster.

 

Stick this in your “cloud” and smoke it.

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Everywhere you look these days you hear about that newfangled cloud thing…. and most people ask what the hell is the cloud. I tell them its a pile of shit buzzword. Watching TV you see the Microsoft commercials about the cloud and how you can access your stuff at home…  Or your job… or the moon whatever the fuck.. Here’s and example of said “cloud”

For those whom have had there head buried in the sand or are quite possibly dead… this innovation is as old at the internet it self(of current not arpanet you silly ass).. its called network storage. Introduced in the 1980s

 

Network-attached storage
Connects to Local Area Network via:

Hard Drives via one of:
Common manufacturers HP
NetApp
Dell
Cisco
Netgear
CTERA
Sun Microsystems
Introduced 1980’s

 

 

Yes this amazing new cloud of bullshit buzzwords yay!

And this.. hmm this is not “cloud” like .. the fact these people are accessing there pc at home tells me …. Remote desktop .. YAY MORE OLD TECH CALLED CLOUD! Mind you the guy says “I just brought up our PC at home” yeah… that’s safe.. you’re flying to who the hell knows where and your leaving a PC on 24/7 while your away from the house, when the PC overheats and sets the house on fire – Your house will be a cloud! YAY CLOUD!!

This should be called the windows FartCloud technology

It’s the Cloud! ZOMG!

Microsoft’s idea of the cloud is pretty much rebranding old technology and calling it new.. Some of the other cloud innovations here are just blatantly scary , Such as software as a service .. that’s pretty much a baaaaaaaaaaaaad thing.. Your Office software you bought.. You know the 365 one … You don’t own it. at least the could portion.. also when Office 366 comes out.. and they shut down 365 … Forced upgrade… since your only paying for a service. your stuck in an upgrade cycle for money …  Also you will have zero expectations of privacy .. Your account gets hacked? your shit is good as stolen.

What companies are banking on is that you buy into the cloud without any research thinking “Hey this is cool wizbang tech!”

When it comes down to office level this is going to be a nightmare.. as to finding your document or having documents that are not supposed to be public leaking out to the public, since the information would be on the “cloud” it maybe a passworded folder and you give it out and someone cleans out the office bank account because the boss left the banking information in the “Cloud”.

Better yet.. this is all on the internet.. the office connection goes down and productivity goes to zero since no one can access the files..

All these “cloud” services are going to open a black hole when some random company hosting your cloud goes out of business and you cant access your data anymore. not to mention there will likely be a monthly/yearly price to pay for this rather than paying a one time costs.. Its Like renting a car that you have no control over and only can do simple things on like turn on the lights and honk the horn yet your paying a cost X infinity , rather than a one time license cost. These companies will at first seem cheaper than buying software outright but when you figure that over a period of months or even years . the “cloud” costs will greatly exceed the software costs.

And I’ve said it many times… the cloud is just rehashed shit with rainbow farts and ponies with glitter just to stuplify the average user into thinking he is getting something better than it really is.

The risks building a company around the cloud is just insanely risky … From buying ultra cheap terminals that can only access the cloud, to having to build a connection that can handle massive amount of data throughput. if you have a company of 100 people all using the fartcloud you need 100 networked computers that has a zero lag time connection to manipulate data. if you have a crowd-sourced project with lag you will have 50 people fixing one problem and not realized that the other 50 just did the same thing and wasted about an hours of productivity due to each person wasting 30 seconds fixing a problem that was fixed by 1 person.

The idea of the cloud is just totally not a good idea in its current form since corporations are not looking at this as a productivity tool but more as a subscription for cash run.. since they have to sell nothing and get a fuckton of money.

 

In the end I really hope people understand what the cloud is and its not anything new nor is it worth it in any means of the word.

bing? bing.. Its just uhh.. yeah..

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Microsoft has been flapping there PR mouth over there new search engine bing. After the failed livesearch and another companies shit fest of a search engine.  It seems like Microsoft has learned a thing or two about search engines but, not much. It was more like “lets just rip off another popular search engine. ” Microsoft has been smearing there new Bing.com everywhere, Hulu is running ads , likely there is ads on TV . but, it appears that bing will be not ignored like cuil was, Microsoft will likely force bing down our throats every way possible.  Just to give an idea how microsoft will pull is.

  • Windows update will force some update as “critical” to internet explorer forcing bing to the front
  • Update MSN clients to have bing built in
  • Windows 7  will likely have it forced on the desktop
  • Come out with some goofy firefox plugin (maybe already done mystery plugin for firefox had come out *cute stealth install too*)

hemantm writes “A routine security update for a Microsoft Windows component installed on tens of millions of computers has quietly installed an extra add-on for an untold number of users surfing the Web with Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser.”

Looking into the name  bing the first definition that comes up on dictionary.com is

bing

1 –noun British Dialect. a heap or pile.

As funny  as that is , Bing is almost an identical ripoff of  Google.

binghere’s the same same search in google .

googlethe result pages look almost EXACTLY the same.  Microsoft has made an attempt to make a search engine but, its a blatant ripoff of Google.  Playing around with Bing it seems alright but, again looking at the search engine there’s no fucking difference. The supposed Smart search engine that bing is just tries to give you the same results. Yes there are features in this search engine but Google already does 99.99% of bings search results.

Do we need another Google? NO, if Microsoft actually made something unique it would be one thing, At least cuil made an attempt at being unique.  In order to do something better with the search engine Microsoft should try something different than work from there with a dynamic interface that takes opinions from users.

But my vote on this search engine is no , its a shamefully blatent ripoff of google.  Its insulting, microsoft has billions of dollars yet they can’t come up with there own search engine?

Capital One… What was in your wallet….

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How to start this… 

Capitol one blows Goats 

Back  on November 5th , I called about inquiring on changing a payment due to capitol one making my payment date change. Since i am on Social Security, I normally pay all my bills at the beginning of the month. due to the Oddness of capitol ones business I’d often pay on the 4th to have the payment applied on the 2nd of the month which made no sense to me what so ever. Anyways, I was given Assurances that the pay date would change and the current payment would apply for the month. After that call feeling everything was taken care of I felt everything was going to be OK.. And how wrong i was.

 

The next month .. I goto pay my bills and i find my account has a few charges and fees I was not expecting, One fee for being put over the limit than another fee for late payment that I was assured would not happen, So i made my payment again, to which the payment for this month was applied to the last months payment that i supposedly did not make but was assured it was all set. So i call capitol one again (12/5/07) asking what has happened. after talking to the first person i get transfered to another person. speaking to them with the whole situation , fees/requesting payment change day (Again)/ and about current months payment which was much higher than previous months payment.

First i was told they would remove the fees assessed for the second time, than after a bit i was told the fees were declined from being removed. I explained i have been calling since October with these problems and I told the person to note these things in the computer, not sure if they were just passing me off. Capitol one representative than Said they would issue you me a courtesy -50$ off my account for my problems.

(12/21/07) i call back and notice that they have not given my fees back  nor have they applied the current months payment , instead they apply it to November to which i was told, that also fees were also declined from being removed from my account. at this point i am starting to panic . at this point my mother also speaks to the person and she pays my bill . she gives her account info for her savings, and pays 75 dollars on my bill which brings me up to date with current. 

 

(12/26/07) I go out in the morning to get something using a gift card i received for Christmas, got some lunch, figured I’d go get a coffee but i got a feeling to check my savings account, I was aware of what the balance should of been since i have a piece of paper in my wallet and keep a fairly accurate mental balance in my head but i just wanted to be sure, I goto a local ATM , put in the pin, than proceed to get my account balance to which i lost my mind to, on the paper it said (236.53)- . Me immediately sensing trouble went to the branch and tell the person working that there’s a fairly big problem with my account an that there is money missing, looks it up and says " sir your quite over drawn". I hold my self steady and ask . how in the world could i be over drawn , show the piece of paper and pretty much rattle off the balance that i  knew was correct, thinking i ask  could you print up the last transactions from the account.

 Looking at the paper i immediately spot the problem

### Phone authorization/Capitol One 75.00 12/24/07

I point that out , explain that i never had authorized this and asked if there could be anything done about the fees that were building on the point of capitol ones fault, since they never were given permission to take from the account.

He has me fill out an affidavit to which say i never authorized this , and that it will be investigated , if Proven the fees will be reversed along with the 75 dollars they removed from my account. I head home thinking what to do.

 

I get home immediatly call Capitol One and ask what the hell they did to my account and they never had authorization to remove funds from my banking account, and the funds that should of been withdrawn was from my mothers account. I get immediatly transfered up the line. I repeat the whole sitaution asking why funds that were taken from my account were , the fact they never had authorization and also that i had my bank investigating this as well. I get put on hold while he "checks out what has happened" about 5 minutes later he comes back from the hold and his demenor has changed , almost every sentence starts with "sorry" or "we are sorry" . I tell him that due to the situation my savings account is completely trashed *at the time of the call -331.80*. My mother also is on the line asking what has happened and the fact im on socail security and more than half my income for the next month is already gone due to there fuckup. at this point he says sorry again and tells me to have  my bank send a copy of the funds taken from my account + fees taken because of this .

 

I have a real feeling they fucked up here but the matter is do i trust them to right a wrong when they have not come through 2 other times in a row?