Archive for the 'Holy Moses' Category

You know who I mean. Companies who rely on “small print” to steal your money.
Banks and insurance companies are probably the biggest culprits. Somewhere
in page after page of legalese they slip it to you. The contracts you are forced
to sign because you are required by law to purchase services, like auto insurance for example, are written entirely in the company’s favor. After all, they are the ones paying the attorney fees. A common tactic of lawyers is to design run on sentences whose content is so convoluted only company lawyers can figure them out. Somewhere within those often paragraph sized sentences they provide themselves with “weasel clauses” giving them the right to screw you somewhere down the line.

How about credit card companies? These are my personal favorite leaders in the legitimate thief category. They offer what appears to be a good deal up front and then allow you to develop self-destructive habits like overspending. If you were doing fine without something yesterday, chances are you can manage without that something today. But if you own a credit card, why wait? Once you’re in over your head these companies increase your rate. You go “hey, how come my interest jumped from 10 to 20% overnight?”, and they go “read the fine print”. If you have a credit card and have never read the small print I will summarize it for you here. Essentially they can do whatever they want and you are stuck with it.

Then came the Internet. I try to be careful but at least several times a year I get “educated”. The most recent example of internet screwing came to me by way of a company called Ryder Marketing. They offered a “how to make a million online” CD which had some brilliant sales copy and a cheap price, $7.95 delivered, so I decided I might learn something. I was right! About three weeks later I received my disk and before I even opened the package my account was charged an additional $105.00. Long story short, by ordering the disk I was automatically
enrolled in a $1260 year long course payable in 12 easy $105.00 payments. I attempted to have the charges reversed but apparently somewhere in the video “fine print”, which I hadn’t even viewed prior to the charge, I “agreed” to accept one additional disk per month.

Agreed my ass. Moral of that story (and we can thank the Bush banking gangsters for this) is if you don’t know who you are dealing with online, cancel your card after every online transaction. It is your only protection. It turns out even a punk like Ryder has a better attorney than the banks do. (My personal moral to the story is if my money is with Chase, it is no longer safe.)
An interesting note to the Ryder ripoff was my attempt to destroy this guy by posting a scam alert. To my chagrin I had to get in line, and the line was, at that point in time, almost three half-million people long. The guy wasn’t lying. He really is making millions online… by stealing! The worst part was his video wasn’t worth the substrate it was printed on.

I’m not even going to get into health insurance legitimate thievery except to say the only way for us little guys with small money to survive is to align ourselves with bigger money than the legitimate thieves can muster. Unfortunately, and in spite of all the pitfalls and potential for disaster, the only bigger money in Washington than lobby money is the government’s money itself.

We need a government option to keep the health-care legitimate thieves in line.

Imagine a black hole, if you can. There is one or more in every galaxy. These cosmic sized vacuum cleaners suck everything in their neighborhood down a funnel much like water going down the drain. As matter enters the vortex it’s structure becomes more and more compressed.
This is possible because matter primarily consists of empty space. Space between molecules, space between atoms in molecules, space between electrons and nuclei, etc. As the space between these particles of matter decreases the process generates heat. Tremendous amounts of heat. In fact, the trillions of degrees of heat are so intense the particles actually revert to their primal form, energy. Einstein’s theory tells us that the amount of energy created equals the material mass times the speed of light squared.Now lets assume the process occurred on a universe sized scale billions of years before the birth of our universe. Every single gram of matter became a part of a soccer sized ball of pure energy and there is no physical matter left. All knowledge, time, and matter are encompassed in this ball of energy….God, if you will. Then, for reasons not even guessed at yet, the ball blows up. We have the big bang. Energy is spewed out in all directions in a trillion degree heat wave. Our universe is born. As the energy becomes dissipated things begin to cool off. Millions of years later matter begins to form in a process similar to water vapor condensing to steam, and then water droplets. Clouds of the simplest from of matter, one electron circulating one proton, hydrogen, begin to form in galaxy sized clusters.