Pay Attention to Your Phone Bill!

1 07 2008

This morning I opened my email and found my monthly bill for my phone/internet service. It’s the same amount every month so I wasn’t expecting to be surprised but I certainly was as I noticed the amount was $35 more than normal! Since I get a seperate bill for long distance and I block all 900 numbers I knew it couldn’t have been from anyone making calls.

I dug a little deeper and found an odd charge from a company called ILD Teleservices. The description for the charge was for web site hosting, which wouldn’t be odd for me, except for the fact that I have friends with thier own servers and so I don’t pay for hosting! And if I did, how on Earth would the charge get on my phone bill??

So we called ILD and found out that a small time web hosting service (i.e. phony scam business) had made the charge based on a phone call by somebody who used my phone number. Apparently, you can charge these types of things to your phone bill! Or anyone elses phone bill! They had an audio recording of the transaction and the dude gave a phony name, a phony birth date and MY phone number and that’s it! They signed him right up and charged my phone bill!

Luckily, ILD cancelled the charge and so I won ‘t have to pay it, but it’s incredible to me that you can actually charge services with only a phone number and you don’t even have to prove it’s yours!!! I did a quick search and found dozens and dozens of similar complaints where people suddenly found charges on thier phone bills. What’s sad, is that most people probably don’t notice smaller charges and so they probably just pay them.

So, be sure to CHECK YOUR PHONE BILL.


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Why Am I Not Suprised?

12 11 2007

A few days ago I wrote about the Global Warming Farce that is really nothing more than a tool to redistribute wealth and scare everyone into spending billions on largely ineffective “Green” products. Well, today Al Gore joins a large venture capital firm to fund “green” companies.

So what this means is that Big Al is playing both ends as usual. Scream bloody murder and convince the world that there is a huge problem that needs to be fixed. Then turn around and sell so called solutions, at monstrous profits.

Now of course Al Gore says he’s giving his salary from this new venture to some climate group (which he’ll then write off). But we all know that many executives these days get paid in stock options and other perks, which he’s keeping of course. For instance, Steve Jobs of Apple makes only $1 a year for his salary. Yes, that’s one dollar. I wonder why Gore isn’t making his salary figure public?

This is not a crisis, it’s a money grab plain and simple. I mean, if the fate of the world really relied on resolving this “crisis”, why on Earth is this guy doing everything he can to profit from it? That money isn’t going to be any good to anyone if the world is destroyed, is it?

Maybe he knows something we don’t?

Links:

New York Times Story


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The Global Warming Farce

10 11 2007

There’s an interesting post today regarding Global Warming from no other than the founder of the Weather Channel. He basically says that Global Warming is a farce. And I believe him, not only because the piss poor reputation of modern pop science who comes up with a new end-of-the-world scenario every 10 or 20 years (I still remember the ice age scare from the 70’s), but also because I’ve been through a similar scam, not too long ago. The Y2K scam.

Being in the technology field I saw this same type of hysteria during the Year 2000 Bug Scare. This was a real, but manageable issue that really only affected software that depended on the date being correct. So mainly financial, payroll, those types of systems were at real risk of malfunctioning. Nobody can convince me that heart monitors were going to fail, planes fall from the sky, or defense networks fire all their missiles. However, the media saw a hot story to boost ratings, latched onto this, and they blew it into a full blown crisis.

When the people saw this, a few groups emerged. The first group, the chicken-littles, freaked out and wanted to replace everything that had a computer chip in it. The second group saw a chance to be heroes and at the same time infuse their departments, businesses and consulting firms with massive amounts of cash from the first group, and so they wanted to replace everything with a computer chip in it. Everyone else was labeled an idiot.

Of course it wasn’t the end of the world, though you’ll hear many tech people say it’s because the did such a great job. But I’m convinced that most of the work done for “Y2K”, was not done to prevent huge business losses, or to protect the public. It was done because the crisis was seen by the industry as a “blank check”.

There are so many parallels between that crisis and Global Warming it’s amazing. Scientists and governments are using it to fund programs and redistribute wealth. Companies are making huge dollars be churching out ineffective “green” versions of their products (and charging a premium for them). And everyone who disagrees is being labeled an idiot.

Nobody’s going to deny that we have an energy problem because of who owns the oil. Nobody’s going to deny that we have localized pollution problems. But to say we’ve set the entire planet off balance, or are even capable of it, is ridiculous in my opinion.

Links

MorningCoffee
OxfordMedievalist
Icecap.us


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