Double Blind

Rogers’ shell, Fido, is offering a $35/month “unlimited” package for both voice and text messaging that allows people to use their phones within certain urban zones. This is undoubtedly a response to Wind Mobile and Mobilicity coming into the scene with similarly priced packages.

Since cell networks are virtually indistinguishable in terms of quality when you are connected to the network, the only avenues of competition involve geography (e.g. out in Chilliwack there is still no competition between Telus, Bell and Rogers since the new network providers have not expanded out there), but in the urban zones the competition is intense.

There also is data service competition, but this is lesser so because of bandwidth constraints on mobile equipment. Eventually when capacity is higher there should be price compression on the data side as well.

The government decision to only allow new companies to bid on certain chunks of wireless spectrum is allowing the consumers to win with the intensifying competition. Eventually the “party” will end when the new carriers will likely get eaten up by the old ones, but in the meantime consumers can enjoy the cheaper and better alternatives that are being offered amongst them.

Being the economical person that I am, I still think $35/month is too much to pay for mobile phone service – my monthly bill (assuming I don’t do any long distance) is about $25/month after HST.

A few miscellaneous tidbits on the perils of grocery shopping:

1. Why are the price of pine nuts so high? See the picture.

I think I have seen these same collection of bags at Superstore collecting dust for the last six months. I know the answer by some simple Googling, but still…

2. Pricing that states “2 for $6″ instead of saying “$3 each”. This is not to be confused with volume discounting, which would typically go “$4 each, or 2 for $7″. There is some deep consumer psychology at work with the former case – normally stores would want to display the lowest price possible and get people to think that the product is reasonable and purchase it. By putting in a mental calculation in the way (i.e. you have to divide 6 by 2 to get the unit price of $3), consumers that are not numerically inclined may be deceived into thinking they are getting a better price than is listed, and/or purchase 2 when they were only intending to purchase 1.

In particular, some of these calculations are fairly complex – I’ve seen examples as ridiculous as “3 for $3.78″, which really require you to pull out a calculator to figure out that the unit cost is 1 for $1.26.

I am quite sure that grocery store executives (Safeway, Loblaws, etc.) have mined the sales data to death of certain products to see whether this influences sales (either positively or negatively).

With the advent of telemarketing, they had a good 30-year window of opportunity to do enough damage to the social consciousness that almost anybody that picks up a phone these days will hang up on people trying to sell stuff over the telephone. Even people trying to do other stuff than selling (e.g. polling agencies) will receive hostile reactions because of telemarketing or fraud artists.

Caller ID also has put an impact on telephone communication – people that do not recognize the caller will very frequently not respond.

Unfortunately, Caller ID can be forged. This creates a significant authentication issue on the phone network, and I am wondering how long it will be before the telemarketing agencies and/or fraudsters will be able to exploit this.

For example, if somebody called you from a 604 (in the example of Vancouver, but just use your own local area code for those of you that are reading that are not in the 604 area) phone number with the caller ID of “ICBC” (the provincially-mandated automobile insurance company), would you pick up the phone? Probably so, if you had a car.

At a minimum, one barrier is to draft and implement legislation that would make such activity an act of fraud or misrepresentation in the criminal code. This still will not prevent people from using overseas (or even American) conduits to the telephone network to conduct fraudulent operations, but maybe then incoming phone calls into Canada would be marked as international, hence potentially non-authentic.

The telephone network today is a patchwork of improvements since the original system was implemented decades ago, and I am not sure whether these technical capabilities actually existing in the present system, which has increasingly digitized.

I have not been a victim of this so far, but I remain very open to the possibility when I see an unknown caller ring my telephone that the caller ID is not authentic.

A top-10 large earthquake over the past century hit off the coast of Japan. If the epicenter was a bit closer to the shore of Japan it would have been catastrophic, but it appears that this is a slightly lesser degree of severity – a very, very bad natural disaster.

The big headline dominating the news is regarding the operation of nuclear power plants. Almost every anti-nuclear activist is trying to get their quotes in the media. Since the media has no clue how a nuclear power plant operates, they are fueling the hype and speculation, and starting to make comparisons to Chernobyl.

The comparison is completely invalid since the control rods (which moderate power generation from the nuclear core) failed to insert fully in Chernobyl. The control rods in the Japanese plants apparently were inserted successfully.

The evacuation orders are precautionary as venting radioactive steam is not a desirable action but could be required to mitigate the situation.

My friend Justin, in Japan, is safe and wrote a couple short posts on his weblog.

(Update: There was a building collapse at or near the Fukushima 1 reactor – unless if you’re very close to the situation, I don’t think anybody has a clue what is going on.)

(Update 2, from the news: “We’ve confirmed that the reactor container was not damaged. The explosion didn’t occur inside the reactor container. As such there was no large amount of radiation leakage outside,” he said.

Edano said due to the falling level of cooling water, hydrogen was generated and that leaked to the space between the building and the container and the explosion happened when the hydrogen mixed with oxygen there.) – This is good news.

I have written about this earlier in the past, but basically give this article by Robert Rapier a read – the mandate to increase ethanol in fuels from 10% to 15% will be a maintenance disaster for automobiles, unless if you are the ones reaping the money fixing the fuel-related components.

I already suspect that 10% ethanol blending is causing slow damage to vehicles.

The Falls resort golf course (Blackburn Developments) in eastern Chilliwack has gone into creditor protection.

All of the messy documentation (concerning of the statement of claims on the company) can be found here.

There were huge challenges to develop this area – both from a municipal and corporate perspective. The homes they were selling in the area were also notoriously over-priced and they were not able to cash in on the real estate boom of 2007-2008.