Bell and Telus to charge for incoming text messages.

AHHHHH greed thy name is Cellphone Company. Seriously with all the complaints people have had about high prices of cellphones you'd think Telus and Bell would be working hard to show the value in their product. Apparently this is not the case and they have decided to just see what we'll put up with. I guess there is no point in having a virtual monopoly if you don't abuse it. I like the part in the article where they say they need the charges to cover increasing text messaging costs. What kind of costs would those be exactly? at the rate they're charging for a 160 character message that's about 11 characters per penny it seems unlikly that it is costing that much. Imagine if you got charged by your interent service provider 15 cents per e-mail or even worse an amount of a penny for every 11 characters you'd be having to sell the house to afford e-mail in no time. And yes i know you can avoid the charge by paying for a plan but that might set you back 5$ a month when you don't text enough to make that worth your while. There is of course another way to avoid the charge, you can switch to a competitor such as Virgin, Rogers or Fido. Granted if your stuck in a 3 year contract you're basically toast as the costs outside of the basic plan charges are not covered by it so you might be paying 3-5 $ extra a month just to get spam or messages from friends that you didn't really need. Personally I can't wait till the end of the spectrum auction and we get a look at some of the new players out there.

Telus and Bell get 0 stars out of 5 for changing their plans in a way that will drive consumers to seek other options when they look for cellphones.

Iron Man

Robert Downey Jr. Is out of rehab and back making movies. This movie does a great job of showcasing him at his best. He is funny, arrogant, a playboy, and a snappy dresser but you can't help but like him. Which is weird because at least at the beginning of the movie he is the head of Stark industries, one of the worlds largest defense contractors. He's pretty much the awful person that you'd hate to be associated with, however he's leading the life that we'd all love to have. The movie is really well done with great special effects and sound defiantly worth the watch in the theater. The movie isn't as cartoony as so many of the comic book based movies like Spiderman or the hulk. It also manages to avoid the type of love story type movie that Spiderman has become. While there's alot of sexual tension between Stark and Miss Potts his sexy and efficient assistant, nothing happens and I hope it stays that way in what i'm sure will be many sequals. One other thing, Stay till after the credits as they squeezed in a short scene at the end.

Final review Great movie, lots of action, and I only looked at my watch once.
4.5 stars out of 5.

Fog Lights

So with Gas Prices heading towards 2$ a litre every radio station, tv station and website is spending hours, or pages, telling people how to save gas. Everything from removing weight from your car 1-5%, using a lighter foot on the gas pedal 10-35%, or keeping your tires inflated 1-10%. All of these strategies tend to increase milage just slightly which is always good. The issue I have is that I see soooooo many people driving around with their fog lights on, and I can't understand why, having those lights on will reduce your gas mileage just the same are removing some small amount of weight from the car and they can be turned off with the flick of a switch and not require you to remove your safety kit from the car. The other thing is that it's just annoying to have some one in their big truck come up behind you and bathe the whole of your car in the light of all the lamps in front of the truck. It may also be Illegal in some areas. I would love to see car manufacturers take the lead on this they can make cars in which all maner of things have to be turned on each time you start the car, cruise control, defoggers etc. but for some reason they have left the fog lights (something you almost never really need) as a fixed switch that is on forever if you never turn it off. well here's hoping that someone will make that kind of change in a car/truck and stop the blinding/resorce wasting.

Your luck versus other peoples luck

Has it ever occurred to you that when you speak of luck happening to someone else it's more of an expression of "gee well they couldn't have done it on skill". But when you talk of luck occurring to yourself it's more that you feel that somehow your skill helped make the luck possible.

The example would be something like you were lucky to survive a car crash because if you hadn't swerved at the last moment you would have died, showing your driving skill. But someone else was lucky to win the lottery cause they needed the money, showing their poor state of money management.

How to profit from the world rice shortage but look like you're trying to do something good in 5 easy steps

1. Be Wal-Mart
2. Notice a worldwide food shortage
3. Announce that you'll now be limiting consumers to four times the amount of the product that they would ever normally buy
4. Let Panic buying and hoarding set in.
5. Sit back and let the money roll in.
This week in response to a global rice shortage driven by increasing prices, and low production, Wal-mart announced that it would be limiting people to four 10kg bags of rice per visit. Now I don't know what everyone else normally does but I have never in my life thought that I would need 40kg of rice in one shopping trip. Now if Wal-Mart was recording everybodies addresses and limiting people to 1 bag per month that would be some sort of limit. Still I bought 20 kg of rice in January and have yet to make a significant dent in the bag.
Despite the extremely high nature of the limit that they set, it has led commentators to spend hours talking about food rationing and panic buying despite the fact that there is none of this yet. This "limit" will lead to hoarding and panic buying in North America, driving the price up world wide and increasing the shortages in areas of the world that are already suffering. While shortages do exist in the developing world due to trade restrictions and higher prices it's hard to say that the pallets of rice I saw in Costco today really represent a shortage in North America. Though I have to admit stopping and thinking, "should I buy a few bags now just in case".


So Wal-Mart gets 0 Stars out of 5 for making a decision to create a potential for profit out of a crisis. And the Media gets 0 stars out of 5 for trying to raise their ratings by fanning the flames of crisis for their own selfish ends.

For The Long Emergency Somewhere out there an alarm bell is ringing

I've been looking over a book recently called "The Long Emergency" by James Howard Kunstler. The book has variously been called fearmongering and pessimistic and that probably is true. However being pessimistic doesn't mean that you're wrong. Though I guess it's worse if he happened to be not pessimistic enough. "The Long Emergency" details what will happen to the world when we run out of cheap oil, and everyone who can see the gas price can clearly see that his prediction is coming true. The book focuses on what will need to change in the developed world for us to survive the slow fade as we run out of oil and need to adjust our lifestyles to the new economy. But before the long emergency takes hold another emergency will take place. It will happen when the developing world of 2nd and 3rd world countries start to have food shortages as the cost of oil and transporting food rises and as food production land is converted BioFuels. This Emergency is happening now. The price of basic foods is increasing around the world and in some cases the price of staples like rice and wheat has more than doubled. While this will be annoying for people in the west where food takes up about 10% of income, it will be devastating to the developing world where food is around 80% of a families budget. While we in the west can survive a rise from 10% to 20% of our income for food through cutting back on what we eat and choosing to cut out a few extra purchases here and there. In the developing world this is not the case. If food costs you 8000 pesos out of the 10,000 you earn every month you may be able to survive, but if it costs 16,000 pesos out of 10,000 even with cutting back you will not be able to survive. It's hard to know how this emergency will play out, hopefully we'll be lucky and it will be over with quickly but it's hard to believe that at least some more people won't die as a result before we truely see the end of oil.