Quick Hitts

I just got an e-mail from SiteUpTime which listed a monthly summary of all the times my site has been down in the last month.  The list was blank.  When StartLogic was my host I used to get at least one notice, and often two or three, every day.

A recent comment to this post reminded me of the billing problems I had with StartLogic.

I was running two sites there, davehitt.com, and podcastpeers.org.  My increasing disgust with their crappy performance and non-existent support inspired me to move davehitt.com to DreamHost, but I was putting off moving Podcast Peers because the heart of it was a forum, and moving forums is a major PITA.   (Moving a static site is much easier – you just copy the files to your new host and point the domain at the new host’s name servers.)  However, their daily outages meant I wasn’t going to be able to put it off much longer.

I received an e-mail notice that my hosting for davehitt.com was running out in a month, and they would automatically bill my credit card for the amount (I think it was about $120, but don’t recall exactly) when it came due.  I wrote back and said I had moved the site, that if they were paying attention they would see there was no traffic to it (the files were still there, because I didn’t bother to delete them), and that they were not to bill me.  Two weeks later they notified me again.  Once again, I told them not to.  I even logged on to the site and canceled my account for that domain.  Sure enough, they socked my CC on the appointed date.

I called, pissed, and told them to take the charges off my card.  They said it would take two weeks.  When I told them that was unacceptable they said “Sorry, that’s the way we do it.”  How’s that for customer service?  It takes them a moment to fraudulently charge your card, but two weeks to get around to correcting their mistake.  Two weeks later they still hadn’t refunded my money, so I called again, and finally got my refund.

Calling Startlogic is not fun either.  It takes at LEAST an hour on hold before you get through to anyone, and then they often “accidently” disconnect you.

So now they’ve managed to get even worse – now they’re charging $35 to refund a charge that shouldn’t have been made in the first place.  I guess when your reputation keeps new customers away the only way to make a profit is to screw ex-customers.

BTW, I’ve been very happy with DreamHost.  I did move the Peer Awards over there, and also host Bloodwitness.com with them.  All the sites all under the same account, and they don’t charge any extra for multiple sites, which is pretty sweet.  Their support is very good.  They do it through e-mail, which they respond to quickly.  If you want to call it’s ten bucks for three calls, which is more than reasonable.  (They’re losing money at that rate.)  When my sites got hacked (because I’d neglected a WordPress update) they were able to restore a copy of everything – the static files and the databases, (which they conveniently had on hand) with a minimum of hassle.

If you’re considering them, sign up for a year with the promo code HITTMAN and you’ll get $50 off.

In the meantime, don’t forget: StartLogic Sucks!

One reason Global Warming, er, sorry, Climate Change, doesn’t have me wetting myself in fear is I’ve lived through too many other End Of The World As We Know It predictions. These are a few of the EOTWAWKI predictions I recall in my lifetime:

The Cold War – the most real and likely end of the world. We even came close a couple of times, but it never happened. It ended when Reagan’s military budgets drove the USSR into bankruptcy. Thank you, Ronnie, not only for ending WW III but for the sheer glee of watching lefties go through painful logic contortions to avoid giving you credit.

Armageddon – I was raised in an apocalyptic cult that proclaimed the world would end in 1975. I left them around ’74.  I wasn’t brave; I just realized it was nonsense.  Then I became a vampire.

“Famine 1975” – A bestseller that predicted we’d all be eating our pets by the mid-seventies.  Here we are in 2009 with more food than we know what to do with.  (Sorry, famine-stricken countries.  Your starvation is caused by government and economic policies, not lack of food.)

Global Cooling – The big scare in the 70s was that global cooling was going to kill us all.  We’d be fighting off glaciers and the only way to stop it was to shut down industry.  (Sound familiar?)

Pollution – We were all going to die in our own filth.  Rivers were catching fire!  There was no hope, we were doomed.  (Rachel Carson was before my time, or at least before I was politically aware.)  We were told that breathing in big cities was the same as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day.  (Nonsense, of course, but it scared a lot of people.)  Nixon created the EPA to deal with it, and they actually did, cleaning up things pretty well until Carol Browner took over and turned the agency into a junk science machine whose primary goal, besides increasing their own power and funding, was harassing big companies for sport.

“The Population Bomb” – Another fun EOTWAWKI book, predicting the fall of mankind via overpopulation.  Dr. Paul Erlich has an amazing record.  He’s been predicting disaster for four decades, and  every one of his predictions has been wrong.  His 100% track record has made him a darling of the left, where he continues to pontificate for a living.

The Jupiter Effect – on March 10, 1982, all the planets would line up and the gravitational stress would cause huge earthquakes and probably rip the planet apart.  The planets weren’t really lined up, and even if they were the effect would have been too small to measure.  The most interesting thing that happened on that day was Travis Jackson and Happy Chandler were elected to Baseball Hall of Fame. Also, 28 skiers in Bromont, Quebec performed backflips while holding hands.  No studies were done to see if funky gravity made the feat easier.

Flesh Eating Bacteria – OMG, We’re All Gonna Die because FEB was going to consume our bodies in a matter of hours!  It’s going to spread like bad pop music and kill us all.  Except it didn’t.

The China Syndrome – The movie came out the week of the Three Mile Island accident.  Only one of them was a real disaster, but the two events raised enough fears to stall the development of nuclear power ever since.

Killer Bees – First they’d kill all the regular bees.  Then they’d kill us.  And it will hurt even more than watching the multitude of cheesy movies about it.

The Millennium Bug – Airplanes would fall out of the sky and traffic lights would go kerflooey, causing massive accidents.  Nuclear plants would meltdown and sewerage plants would spew effluent into the environment.  None of that ever happened, due to a massive program to fix software and replace old computers before that fateful day.  I was part of a team working on the problem for a bank.  I found one old computer, whose sole purpose in life was to make one call a day, via modem, and transfer money from a government tax collection department to the bank.  If that had been allowed to fail the result would have been. . . the money sitting in the wrong account for a day or two.

I predicted the bug would cause a few minor incidents, but even that wimpy prediction was wrong.

Bird Flu – Limited to birds, but we should remain afraid because it will cross over and wipe out a billion or two of us.

I’m not sure if this is still considered a current threat or not.  Threats tend to lose their OMG! effect rather quickly, and so have to be replaced by fresh threats from time to time lest we actually relax and enjoy our lives.

And here we are, with fresh new threats to mankind.  And these, were assured, are far more dangerous than those overblown old threats.  Global Warming has morphed into Climate Change, allowing any fluctuation in either direction to be hailed as the EOTWAWKI. And we’ve also got Bee Colony Collapse and Ocean Acidification and and and and…

Pardon me while I don’t get all upset about it. I’ve got far more serious things to consider, like should I make chili for dinner, or have the leftover lasagna?

Oh damn, the lasagna is moldy.  It was good lasagna too. Now that’s worth getting upset about.

Turning off the lights and burning candles instead might feel good, but it occurred to me it probably puts more CO2 in the air than just leaving the lights on.  I wasn’t sure how to calculate the numbers, so Googled the information, and found someone else had already done the math.

Still, I enjoy meaningless symbolism, and wanted to participate in a way that really would help the environment.  I visited a protest rally where “environmentalists” were opposing solar and wind power in the Mohave Desert.  I had been at such rallies before, where I bitch slapped a few people while screaming, “It’s the fucking desert, you morons!”  Surprisingly, that was ineffective, but this time I had something different in mind.

I introduced myself to the greasiest hippie I could find and invited him to celebrate Earth Hour at my home.  When the appointed hour arrived I shut off all my lights and invited him to join me and my neighbors in the back yard.

We told him he was the guest of honor, and formed a circle around him.  Then I set him on fire, and we all laughed and laughed in the bright light of Hippie Fire.  (That’s why I picked a greasy one.  They’re easier to light and burn longer and brighter.)

Now, I’m not a cruel man.  I didn’t want to cause him any unnecessary pain, so before immolating him, I knocked him unconsciousness with the club I use to hunt baby seals.

We all had a grand time, although a few of the neighbors on the downwind side of the circle said the smoke made them light headed, for some reason.  Not only did we have a nice bright light to help celebrate our environmental awareness, we felt good knowing we had helped the planet -  there is now one less protester against renewable energy.

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Edited to Add:  This Video, from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, sums up my feelings about Earth Hour.

Imagine, for a moment, that you’re deeply in debt (I know that’s a big stretch for most of you).  You’ trying to deal with a bill for $1,000 and you’ve got no money to pay it.

Your son has just thrown a quarter in a fountain.  A quarter!  Like you can afford that.

You berate him, condemn him, and do everything you can to make him feel sub-human.  For  days.  Your wife cheers you on, reminding you of your financial trouble and how horribly irresponsible the kid has been.  She comes up with a new rule – he’ll have to give back 90% of his allowance.  You agree this is a just and fair punishment.  She calls a press conference to condemn the child, and riles up the neighbors.  She goes on a late night talk show and incites more bile against this horribly irresponsible kid.  You join in, of course. You’re so caught up screaming at the kid you completely forget one little thing: Your wife generated the original bill.

This economic meltdown was created by the government.  It started with Jimmy Carter’s Community Reinvestment Act, which required that banks hand out loans to low income people buying crappy property.  Banks responded and adjusted, and some even managed to turn it into a modest profit center.

Clinton put the program on steroids.  He demanded the act be expanded, and made it much easier for groups like ACORN to harass banks that didn’t comply.  He commanded Fannie and Freddie to increase the number of sub-prime loans that they handed out or insured.  Bush added more fuel to the fire by upping Fannie/Freddie’s requirements.

In order to comply banks, mortgage companies and lending institutions started handing out loans to anyone who could fog a mirror.  The prices of homes skyrocketed as more and more mouth-breathers bought property they’d never be able to pay off.

Companies like AIG used the mess to create flaky financial instruments that no one really understood  and sell them to banks all over the world.  Credit rating companies helped by giving them triple A ratings.  And everyone was happy, buying and selling and counting their profits.  It was a ghetto garage sale, where everyone got rich selling their broken radios and frayed clothes  to each other.

Of course it came crashing down.  It had to.  And yes, AIG and all the other participants contributed greatly to the mess.  But it never would have happened if the government had let business make loans using time-tested principles for calculating risk.  There wouldn’t have been enough sub-prime mortgages to create this mess if it weren’t for our past presidents and congress’ insisting that home ownership was far more important than sound business principles.

Yes, I’m pissed at the bonuses too.  They’re wrong and they’re stupid.  But compared to the trillions we’ve spent trying to fix this, screaming at AIG is like beating up a drunken frat boy for pissing into a poorly constructed New Orleans levy, blaming him for causing the flood, and ignoring the real culprits – the ones who undermined the levy in the first place.

Where’s the best place to build a massive solar power plant?  In the middle of a desert, of course.  And what’s to stop it?  Environmentalists, of course.

The Mohave Desert is the perfect place to build solar plants.  There’s lots and lots of sun, it’s far away from any development, and the worst ecological risk is that you might annoy a tortoise or a gerbil.  But that’s not good enough for Dianne Feinstein , who wants to make it a national park for the specific purpose of preventing development of the solar and wind plants that have been proposed.  She wrote an indignant note to Interior Secretary Ken Salazer: “This is unacceptable. I urge you to direct the BLM to suspend any further consideration of leases to develop former railroad lands for renewable energy or for any other purpose.”

We have recently discovered oil fields so vast they’d completely free us from dependence on foreign oil .  We can’t develop them because, well, oil is bad, mkay?.  Mention Nukes and the eco-freaks scream about radiation and wave around DVDs of “The China Syndrome,” which they bought from the dollar bin.  And now solar and wind are being prohibited!  Aaaaanold put it best:  “If we cannot put solar power plants in the Mojave desert, I don’t know where the hell we can put them.”

I wish there was a way to prohibit these assholes from using any energy at all for a week.  Those who didn’t change their tune in a week would get to go three months energy free.  And if any hardcore tree huggers were still opposed to solar and wind in the middle of a desert they’d be moved into a replica of the Unibombers cabin with nothing but a bucket and a machete.

But we won’t do that.  Instead, the eco-freaks will continue their fight against civilization until we’re all freezing to death in the dark.

Don’t make the mistake of re-reading the book before seeing the movie. You’ll get too distracted by the things added and removed from the flick. I would have enjoyed it more if I went in with only a vague memory of the book.

I was hoping for a great movie. Instead, I got a pretty good movie.

It inspired me to name my next rock band “Dangling Blue Wang.”

The biggest change, of course, is the ending. Sorry fan-boys, but the movie ending is better than the book. It was true to the spirit of the story (I was afraid they were going to do this with a happy ending) and tied everything together better than the original comic did.

But if you’re a real fan-boy, if you just can’t handle the new ending, I’d suggest seeing the movie and then going out for some calamari. But it has to be great calamari. Mind blowing calamari.

I meant to post about this when it happened a couple of weeks ago. Today I was reminded about it by a catalog from JR Cigars, announcing the 54% tax increase on cigars.

Obama promised none of his tax increases would hit the poor or middle class. He lied. Surprise surprise.

SCHIP was originally intended to provide health insurance for poor kids. The Democrats tried to expand it dramatically under Bush, but he vetoed it. But under our new deadly combination of a socialist president and a socialist congress, it slithered through, virtually ignored by the mass media.

Not content with redefining anyone making more than $250k as rich, he’s now defined people making up to $63k as poor, poor enough to be covered by SCHIP. States will be able to raise this to $83K if they like. The cost of SCHIP is to be covered entirely by taxes on smokers.
Here are the tax increases:

• Cigars from 20.719% to 52.75% per 1000 over 3 lbs with a 40.26 cents per cigar cap (+155%)
• Little cigars from 4.0 cents to $1.00 per pack (+2,400%);
• Cigarettes from 39 cents to $1.01 per pack (+159%)
• Snuff from 58.5 cents to $1.51 per pound (+158%)
• Chewing tobacco from 19.5 cents to 50.33 cents per pound (+158%)
• Pipe tobacco from $1.0969 to $2.8126 per pound (+156%)

As horrible as these taxes are, the worst was the attack on the poorest of the poor – the people who are trying to save money by rolling their own.

• Cigarette papers from 1.22 cents to 3.15 cents per 50 (+158%)
• Cigarette tubes from 2.44 cents to 6.30 cents per 50 (+158%)
• Roll-your-own tobacco from $1.09 to $24.78 per pound! (+2159%!)

I predicted this back in 2000:

Technically, rolling your own isn’t a tea party because the supplies are available retail and are not heavily taxed. But if enough smokers start doing this you can be assured the politicians will implement punitive taxes on the bulk tobacco, the kits, the tubes, the box it comes in, the cellophane used to wrap the box and the ink used to print the instructions. Be ready to start ordering from Indian reservations and overseas suppliers when it happens.

Smoking is more prevalent among people with lower incomes, so they’ll the hardest hit. A smoker making $20k a year now has to pay for the larvae of someone making three times as much.

But Obama isn’t going to raise taxes on the poor, no sir.

This will lead to an even more massive move toward “black market” tobacco, and it should.

The American Revolution was started over taxes on tea.  The colonists were weren’t just pissed about the amount of the tax, (which was far, far, far lower than today’s tobacco taxes) but on being taxed without representation. Tobacco users are now paying taxes of hundreds of percent, and in some cases, thousands of percent. When was the last time you heard anyone, in any governmental body, propose anything that could be construed as representing smokers? When smokers flock to Indian reservations and overseas vendors to avoid draconian taxes, they shouldn’t be regarded as criminals. They should be regarded the same way we regard the perpetrators of the Boston Tea Party: as patriots refusing to kowtow to government oppression.

Big Brother, of course, is pissed at these patriotic Americans who refuse to screwed. In my state, NY, Governor Patterson is trying to force Indian reservations to pay federal taxes. The reservations are refusing, of course. The last time a governor tried this the Senecas started a tire fire on the Thruway, a major thoroughfare in NYS that runs through their reservation. I saluted them, and if they’re going to do it again I have a few spare tires in my garage I’ll be happy to donate.

The next time someone praises the Lord Messiah Obama about his concern for the poor, ask them about his 2,400% tax increase. They’re probably not even aware of it.