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Bubbles, Bubbles, Bubbles

September 8, 2016 by Lazy Man 3 Comments

That title isn’t just what my wife sings while at the Bubble Lounge in San Francisco or while in a spa… it’s the topic of today’s article.

Earlier this week, I said I was going to try to be more positive. So before I get into some heavy negative stuff, I feel it’s worth reflecting how awesome life is. It’s not lost on me that I’m part of small percentage of the privileged few in a privileged country. We carry awesome computers with us that have almost any information that people want. We can tell our Amazon Echo to play Jack Johnson and instantly be happy. (Or maybe that’s just me.)

Sometimes I think the negative stuff stands out to me like a sore thumb because of the sharp contrast with all the awesomeness of everything else? What’s that phrase that people use nowadays, “first world problems”? Exactly.

I want everyone to have all the awesomeness and none of the bad stuff. And a lot of that awesomeness comes with money and financial freedom. When I see people or business taking that away from people, it makes me sad… very sad. No one likes a sad, Lazy Man.

Let’s Get to the Bubbles

I’m not really sure if these really meant the definition of “bubbles”, but that’s kind of the road I went down. One might also call it capitalism running amok without regulation… or at least “timely” regulation.

Cable Companies and Bundling

Yesterday, I wrote my experience with Cox cable/Internet pricing. In case you missed it, they seem to automatically assess a $25 fee for a declined credit card. In addition, they require products that some consumers don’t want (me in this case) to get a “bundle deal.” When that expires consumers who fail or forget to complain feel the pain of raised prices. For what it’s worth the FTC does have a page about bundled communication services, but it looks like it really isn’t a priority for them at this time.

I got several comments and not one was in support of Cox or their cable company. Many claimed that because they have a monopoly in their area (like Cox in mine) and lack choice, the pricing just keeps going up and up. I’d say that’s an example of capitalism run amok without regulation. In fact, a few people commenting openly wished regulators would step in.

In the meantime, is it wrong for Cox, or any other cable company, to make as much money as it can? It’s in the business to make money, right? If tactics that some described as “shady” makes them more money that’s just the business doing business stuff, right? I don’t agree with this thinking.

Housing Market in 2008

This is an easy and famous bubble, right? We saw housing prices go up and up. At least part of the reason was because mortgages were easy to get. And as prices of homes got higher, banks created new mortgages to keep putting people in homes. You can reduce the monthly payments on house by making offering a 50-year, interest-only mortgage.

I wonder how many people are still digging out of that mess. The condo I bought in 2005 is worth about $50,000 less than what I paid for it. That’s kind of a big deal, right?

Student Loans

I haven’t followed student loans too closely as I’m passed that age (Thanks for the scholarship, Brandeis!) and my kids are in pre-school. However, it seems to me that colleges have been regularly raising prices (similar to the home market above) and using a similar idea to the new mortgages… people will just get more financial aid.

Medication (such as EpiPens)

I’m sure you haven’t missed the news of late, but prices of medication are drastically shooting up as well. It’s rarely that the products are better or more effective. Instead we find the same kind of passing of the buck as above. In this case, insurances cover some of the cost, so the medications may not seem as expensive, but the result has been raising insurance premiums.

Multilevel Marketing Scams

I’ve covered these extensively in the past. This isn’t exactly like the above products, because you can simply choose not to buy the products, and it doesn’t hurt that like not having a home, education, internet, or medication. Instead, companies found a way to sell hundreds of thousands (maybe millions) of consumers things like $45/bottle juice or $70/bottle salt water make outlandish health claims by its salesforce and bundling the purchase with a “business opportunity” in selling products via an artificially closed market.

What Can We Do?

In all these cases, I’m not exactly sure what we can do. Congress and the FTC are looking into one or more of these areas, but it seems like all they do is talk. I don’t see any meaningful action.

In the meantime, it seems we are left to fend for ourselves as best we can. We try to stay healthy to avoid rising medical costs. We say “no” to $45/juice and MonaVie goes out of business. We decide to look into ways that we can eliminate our cable package. We look schools that present better “value” rather than the very best education.

It’s not ideal, but it’s your money and in the end, you are the only one who can protect it.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: cable, housing, medication, MLM, student loans

The End of An Era and The Beginning of a New One

July 19, 2016 by Lazy Man 2 Comments

This Saturday we lost electricity… and along with it my old Dell Zino. I first wrote about it when I looking to do my digital media overhaul in August 2011. It’s a fun article to reflect upon. I had two $99 HP Touchpads coming to the house the next day. That’s how long the Dell Zino was with us.

The Dell Zino was an Home Theater PC (HTPC) that we used to elminate our cable box rental fees along with this SiliconDust HDHomeRun Prime and a very cheap cableCARD from your cable company.

The combination of an HTPC, Microsoft Windows Media Center, and the HDHomeRun Prime, gave us almost everything that we’d get from renting a DVR from the cable company. We didn’t get OnDemand, but we also had a full computer for running, Netflix, Hulu, a Plex Server, and the incredible PlayOn TV.

The Dell Zino was $550 and the HDHomerun Prime was a couple of hundred on top of that. It wasn’t exactly a cheap solution to avoid paying cable fees, but it felt good. Now that we are sending Zino the Wonder Television to the eternal entertainment center in the sky, I can finally calculate how much it might have saved us.

Yesterday I went to the Cox store to get a replacement box. The idea was to get a short-term solution while I wait for the successor. I could get a box for $1.99/mo. that essentially allowed me to watch TV. For $8.50, I could get a digital guide and OnDemand. For another $15 (on top of the $8.50), I could get DVR functionality. That’s $23.50/mo. for what I had with the Zino (again, minus OnDemand). That’s $282 or $1410 over the 5 years we had the Zino.

That set-up cut our DVR costs in half! If you count that the HDHomeRun Prime is still fine it wouldn’t be too much of stretch to say it saved us nearly $1000.

I’m not sure if getting 5 years out of the Zino was good or bad. I rarely have a computer last that long, so that’s good. On the other hand, it didn’t have to do too much. It usually ran one application. I would expect it to last a long time.

The Replacement May Be a Problem

I knew that the Zino was on its last legs. I had been looking for a replacement, but I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. Microsoft ended Windows Media Center in Windows 10. It simply isn’t available in any form. It was the only software that works well for all the premium channels. With Windows 8 you had the option to get Windows Media Center, but you had to pay extra for it.

So ideally, I’d be looking for a computer with Windows 7. That’s not easy to find as most new computers are sold with Windows 10. I noticed a deal on a rare Windows 7 computer Amazon Prime Day, but I didn’t pull the trigger. I simply didn’t want to spend another $600 that day.

What a difference a weeks makes.

It seems like my luck comes in two forms: extremely good and the bad. This is a case of extremely good luck. I happened to go on Slickdeals where I saw the deal originally. The original deal expired, but it happened to be back!

For those who aren’t tech nerds, the processor in my old Zino scored 1782 on a Passmark benchmark test. The new processor scores a little over 10,000 on the same benchmark test. Roughly, the brains are 5.5 times faster… but there are a lot of other speed enhancements as well (faster memory, faster graphics, etc.). I wouldn’t be surprised if it was 10 times faster in practice.

The price was ~$620 with taxes, so not too much more than the original Zino. It’s a bigger computer, but not too big.

Here are the full specs for technology nerds:

  • Intel Core i7-6700 Quad Core 3.6GHz CPU
  • 16GB DDR3L Memory
  • 2TB HDD
  • AMD Radeon R9 360 2GB GDDR5
  • 2x USB 3.0
  • 4x USB 2.0
  • 1x HDMI
  • 1x VGA
  • DVD-RW
  • 802.11bgn WiFi + Bluetooth 4.0
  • Windows 7 Professional 64 Bit (Includes Windows 10 Pro License)

There’s room for improvement like an SSD, more USB 3.0 ports, a Blu-Ray drive, and 802.11ac wifi. I may end up putting an SSD in it, but I’ll give the traditional HDD a shot first. I had zero 3.0 ports, so having 2 is nice. I have an external portable Blu-Ray drive, so that’s not a big deal. I typically use the Ethernet connection for the media center since it needs to be near the cable connection anyway. Thus the WiFi isn’t a big deal.

I’m excited to have a processor that fast with that much memory. I have been using laptops that are designed with chips to save power for years. Even the Zino used chips designed for a laptop. I imagine it will be quite an increase in performance to go back to the power of a full desktop.

I’m hopeful that it will be relatively easy to get Windows Media Center set back up. I’ll let you now how it goes.

Filed Under: Spending, Technology Tip Tagged With: cable, cable box, HTPC

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