Let’s give that sentence another go. ”…up to 99% more…”So for instance, if you have 100 “plaques” in your mouth and brushing gets rid of just 20 of them, will AirFloss get rid of 99 of the plaques… leaving just 1 nasty plaque? No it does not. It gets rid of 99% more than brushing. In my example, about 19 more plaques than brushing alone for a total of 39… or in reasonable terms “almost twice as much”. Apparently that fine statistic wasn’t good enough for Phillips America. The fact that they chose to say “99% more” instead of “100% more” or “twice as much” demonstrates that they were trying to deceive. “99% more” is simply an unreasonable claim any way you slice it. I am disappointed in Philips.
Now I’m not calling the Philips marketeers fucking liars, I’m just saying that trying to pull a fast one like that is deceptive, immoral and against the Federal Trade Commission’s guidelines. (Amazon.com listing)
Until last year, people could buy dollar coins with their credit cards from the US Mint and have them delivered, with no shipping or service fees. People often used this “loophole” to rack up airline miles on their credit cards. The purpose of this crazy loss-leader by the US Mint was mostly to get people to use Sacajawia dollars!
Here’s an online forum where people are bemoaning the loss of their beloved loophole. And talking about how nobody likes the coin. For instance, “the cashier [at the supermarket] told us that nearly all of the $1 coins that make it into the cashier tills get rolled and sent back to the fed because most customers refuse them in change.” There’s a hundred more stories just like it.
Funny.
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I despise the coin because it is indistinguishable from a quarter when feeling for it in your pocket and under moderate to poor light. And the gold color fades over time, making it look even more like a quarter. Some folks have disagreed with me about the pocket test until I put them to the test. Every person changed their tune when I asked them to try the pocket test themselves.
The US Mint continues to throw good money after bad. It bothers me at how stupid their efforts are and how they are doing it “for the people”. If they could get a dollar coin to stay in circulation, the rewards would be dramatic: dramatic savings in minting costs.
A dollar bill costs about $0.10 to mint and lasts about 1 year
A dollar coin costs about $0.20 to mint and lasts about 30 years.
The US mints about 20 million $1 bills every day, costing about $2 million per day, or $730 million/year.
If we switched to a dollar coin, the US would only need to mint about 666 million $1 coins, costing about $133 thousand per day, or $48 million/year
Switching from bills to coins would save about $680 million dollars/year, every year. Not bad for fixing one stupid problem.
But more than that, it is bad design and bad design hurts my soul. I want nothing to do with it.
Notice that this post is in the Rants category. This subject just steams my goat!
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We’ve been at this whole commercial flight thing for about a hundred years. You would think that the airlines could create a simple, clear flight plan for me. EVERY trip I have made for the last 20 years I have had to translate their gobbly-gook flight reservation into something legible. The relevant data is always the same. Could someone in the airline industry please recognize this? Give me a calendar item that I can copy and paste into my life!
Here’s what I compiled from the gobbly-gook for my latest flight. This is what I put in my calendar:
Flight Ref: XXXX
Monday November 21st
depart SFO at 10:35am on AA flight 556
arrive Chicago at 4:55pm
depart Chicago 8:30pm on AA flight 4308
arrive Nashville 10:00pm
Friday November 25th
depart Nashville 4:30pm on AA flight 661
arrive Dallas at 6:40pm
depart Dallas at 9:20pm on AA flight 1575
arrive SFO at 11:05pm
Short. Readable. Useful.
But here is what they sent me. Sure it contains all the relevant data but why am I forced to spend 5 minutes every flight to glean the useful data for my flight?
Bonus points will be awarded if they put a “Add to Google Calendar” icon next to the reservation so I don’t even have to copy-paste. But hey…
Please please please understand that your phone number does not look like this:
415.555.1212
The use of periods in people’s phone number started during the Dot Com boom of 1999. People wanted their phone numbers to look more “internety”. By replacing the parenthesis and dashes with periods, your phone number resembles an IP address. But it isn’t.
It was a cute fad. But now more than ten years later, when you use dots in your phone number, you demonstrate that you do not know the difference between a phone number and IP address. It’s like writing the word “interweb” on your business card. It makes you look dumb.
The accepted ways of writing a phone number are:
(415) 555-1212 or 415-555-1212.
I prefer the latter because it uses fewer characters and the idea of an area code, the thing specified inside the parenthesis, isn’t important for many areas any more. In many urban areas there are overlapping area codes so you must dial all 10 digits. Simply put, a phone number used to be 7 digits long but now it is 10 digits long. But don’t be distracted by this last point. Just know: don’t use periods in your phone number. It makes you look like a Luddite.
QE2: Fed pulls the trigger (CNN Nov 3, 2010)
Short form:The fed is going to buy 600 billion dollars in T-bills as part of a Quantitative Easing program (e.g. paid for with money they borrowed from themselves… e.g. they just effing printed it)
Ok, now the big question: Should I cash out my meager life-savings now?
(Yes I know that if every individual cashed out the way I am considering, the world would get all Mad Maxy real quick. But I have to act as an individual, right? I cashed out in September 2008 for a few months; I ended up loosing about 30% of my life savings to the credit crunch while many people lost 50%; it was the right decision then.)
When I double-click a .mov file, it takes 30+ seconds for Quicktime to power up and play the file.
When I plug my iPhone into my computer, it takes 2+ minutes to backup the iPhone every time… and THEN it starts syncing.
iTunes is DOG SLOW to do anything and everything. It is USELESS as a player of anything because I can’t even freaking scroll down a list without frustration.
It never was a very good podcast player. I just switched back to the open source, free, Juice podcast player (an app that hasn’t been updated in 5 years!) and it’s sooo much better.
The interface is still completely non-intuitive. While I watch other people using it, their mouths always say “it’s so easy!” but the frustration in their fingers and eyes tell me they are lying.
I just reinstalled windows due to a hard drive crash. My computer was lighting fast at everything as I was reinstalling apps until I came to reinstalling iTunes. Fucking boat anchor of an application.
The ONLY reason I use iTunes is to sync my iPhone to Outlook.
The new Philips Sonicar AirFloss looks cool and they claim that it “removes up to 99% more plaque compared to regular brushing“, wow! 99%, that’s amazi…. wait a minute!
Now I’m not calling the Philips marketeers fucking liars, I’m just saying that trying to pull a fast one like that is deceptive, immoral and against the Federal Trade Commission’s guidelines. (Amazon.com listing)
