Category Archives: Opinion

What is Bloomberg Thinking? NYC seeks to ban big sodas from restaurants

  By Big Dan | June 13, 2012 - 12:21 pm |
1 Comment

(CNN) – New York City officials are proposing banning the sale of large-size sodas and other sugary beverages at restaurants and food carts.

“More than half of NYC adults (58%) are overweight or obese,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg tweeted Thursday. “We’re doing something about it.”

Read full story: New York City seeks to ban big sodas from restaurants, food carts – CNN.com.

This is another one of those feel good regulations that accomplishes almost nothing. Mayor Bloomberg has already led the charge helping banning most transfats and lowering sodium. Is anyone thinner? Not to mention, all of these regulations appear to be aimed squarely at fast food places.

Don’t get me wrong, people in this country need to eat healthier and lose weight, but is it the government’s place to regulate people into eating healthy? Not in my book, We all see how much banning substances has helped in the past; Just look at prohibition or the war on drugs.

We need much better nutritional education starting in grade school. The scare tactic commercials are a great start but no substitute for starting on nutrition education early!

Just watch this:

How much do you want that soda now?

As a kid who grew up in the 90s and had soda every day, no one told me how bad soda is for you. Heck, I doubt my mother realized the negative health effects of soda. My nutrition education was very basic at best. In the 7th grade, we took health class and spent maybe one class period (45 mins) on the food pyramid. Has that changed yet? We need to start teaching kids proper nutrition in the 1st and 2nd grades and pound it into their heads all the way through high school if want to nip the obesity epidemic in the bud. At best it will take a generation or two to stem the tide.

Only when people have all the facts can they make educated decisions.

I applaud Mayor Bloomberg for doing something but more regulation doesn’t help anyone.

Netflix is now Netflix / Qwikster

  By Big Dan | September 20, 2011 - 1:14 pm | ,
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Netflix Envelope LogoLike many other Netflix customers, I received a pseudo-apology letter yesterday from Reed Hastings Netflix’s CEO. The letter also stated the fact that Netflix would be split up into two companies. In my opinion, the reasoning outlined in the letter was convoluted at best. How does making your customers manage two separate accounts benefit them? That’s my biggest question and for the life of me I cannot come up with an answer.

 

My thoughts are that within the next 6 months the prices of both Qwikster and Netflix will go up again, significantly citing increased licensing costs, increased costs of running two separate business entities, blah, blah, blah.

Netflix has always been a great value even when they raised their base price for 1 DVD at a time and unlimited streaming by 60% just this month, I still thought it was a good deal. Sure, I balked a little as anyone would but I had no intension of closing my account.

When I first started my account in 2008 streaming wasn’t a big deal. Getting unlimited DVDs by mail as you returned them with no late fees was pretty awesome. What little streaming selection there was at the time was limited to just watching on your computer. Since I’d never been a fan of sitting at my computer to watch video, I barely used it.

Life got busy and I put my account on hold for a year.  When I finally  jumped back into Netflix around late 2010ish, streaming was becoming pretty popular and the selection was quite a bit better so I ponied up for a Roku box which is pretty awesome in itself. Great, I can watch pretty much anything I want anytime I want.

When the Apple TV 2 came out, I ponied up for one so I’d have a box in the living room that the family could enjoy.

Netflix succeeded in making streaming my # 1 choice. The DVDs became secondary to streaming. They’re great to watch newer movies that aren’t yet available on streaming but DVDs sit on my entertainment center for 2-3 weeks before I finally got around to watching one.

Like many other customers I’ve held out hope that the streaming selection would soon rival DVDs. With all the press of Netflix adding this content and that content it seemed like it just might happen. It never has.

To be fair, the crappy streaming selection isn’t Netflix’s fault. If Netflix had it’s way, everything would be available on streaming and the DVD business would be secondary. The studios don’t want to cannibalize their pay per view rentals and DVD/Blu Ray sales. I get that.

Since my old Roku box is on permanent loan to a neighbor who has fallen on hard times and cannot afford cable, a second Roku box has been added to my collection, the newest model is pretty snazzy with Angry Birds. I just couldn’t pass it up.

Now it’s an in for dollar in for a pound thing with me. Between Roku boxes and my Apple TV, I’m in $300 in boxes to stream Netflix sure they’re able to stream other things but I would never have bought them if it weren’t for Netflix.

For now, canceling the DVD portion is out of the question unless a RedBox pops up locally.  The real question is how long until Netflix prices themselves out of my monthly budget? How long until I say screw it and cut my losses with the boxes?

Time Warner Cable — Where do I start?

  By Big Dan | September 3, 2011 - 1:24 am | ,
2 Comments

As a Time Warner cable customer for many years I wonder where to start. Do I start with your internet service is generally awesome and trouble free? Do I tell you that your home phone service has been trouble free since it was installed two weeks ago?

All this is true but your video service absolutely SUCKS since the move to all digital!

  • It’s so bad that my family would rather use the TV’s tuner than your clunky set top boxes.
  • My bedroom is the only remaining cable box which happens to be a DVR.
  • The aforementioned  DVR’s software is so slow, clunky, and unresponsive to remote control input that I often wonder if I hit the button hard enough.
  • I’ve had a new drop run from the pole directly to my apartment subverting the building’s existing wiring.
  • I’ve changed more cable boxes than I care to remember mostly at my expense traveling 45 minutes each way to your closest office.
  • A previous  technician put some sort of locking head on the leads to my spitters. For what reason, I don’t know, but I do know that 1 of them is a splitter I bought and paid for. You have no right to do that. Especially to a customer who forks over his hard earned money for crappy hardware and what’s turned out to be crappy service.

The regular technician to my area who happens to be a helluva a guy fixes an issue and jokingly says I’ll see you in a couple months. The sad part is he’s right.

You swap out my DVR with a new one to ‘repair’ a pixilation issue. In turn your wiping out all my recordings, saved series, etc only to have the tech find out it’s a wiring issue, replace the wire, but cannot give my back the DVR he just pulled out because he’s already deactivated it. To add insult it injury a week later the new DVR is pixalating and stuttering on the same channels all over again. Restarting the cycle of waiting two weeks for a tech to swap it out all over agian.

You charge me, a loyal customer who forks over his money month after month $55 to install home phone service which is already priced ridiculously high compared to other VIOP options yet waive that charge for a new customer.

You refuse to credit me for a set top box that froze up and was sitting on my table unused for 3 months because “the equipment was still on your premisses”. The thing is you and I both know you can look in your logs and see when that MAC address was last active on your network.

You won’t even credit me for the $30 I paid to you for a useless set tup box. Should I send you the bill for the gas burned to return those boxes? The funny thing is yous will send a tech out to replace a box but not to pick one  up. How self-serving your company policies are.

The sad thing is this note isn’t even written by a TV addict. I’m a guy who has a DVR only because I cannot stand commercials. You know what I cannot stand more? A company the values a new customer over a loyal customer. A company that has it’s hand in so many pots that it’s primary service SUCKS the big one and it doesn’t even care.