After 17 years of service, my oven mitts are retiring to file 13. Since they last so long, it’s worth getting the best replacements. My research concluded that the competition is a dead heat between these Grill Gloves ($50) or a pair of these Silicone Oven Mitts ($25). I chose silicon because I can clean them with a quick rinse in the sink and go right back to using them.
AT&T cramming: Part 2
In 2011, a miscreant abused AT&T’s Wireless Access Protocol payment system and add unauthorized charges to my account. When I noticed the charges, I called AT&T. After getting the initial “we can only refund 3 months” runaround, I escalated the matter until I got a full refund. I also had AT&T add Purchase Blocker to all 4 of my lines.
Today I logged in to my AT&T account and noticed that, quite helpfully, AT&T now highlights these “billed mobile purchases.” Unfortunately, two new recurring charges were added to my account in January. Jesta, one of the companies behind the crammed charges are self-professed scammers that were fined $1.2M by the FTC in August. As part of the judgement, they are required to refund all charges when customers request it.
AT&T knowingly allows these scammers to bill AT&T customers, which greatly peeves me. I tallied up the charges, called AT&T, and requested a full refund. After getting the same “we can only refund 60 days” runaround, I again escalated the matter and have a full refund being processed. AT&T has no idea why Purchase Blocker got dropped from two of my lines but it has been re-added.
The most interesting part is the email excerpts from Jesta cited in the FTC complaint. Beyond admitting their business is a scam, they discuss ways to keep their return rate below 17%, the rate at which T-Mobile takes away Jesta’s ability to charge customers. AT&T cares even less for their customers and is willing to let scammers reach a 18.5% return rate. Is there any legitimate business with return rates above 10%?
A use for jet skis
As an early birthday present, Jen bought me an hour ride on a Flyboard. It’s an awfully fun way to fly.
Money and Trust
My first employer had his landscaping business looted by his CPA, who then skipped the country. That incident planted a seed of mistrust in my mind for all financial service professionals (CPA, CFP, CFA, IFP, etc.).
Every time I hear people tell about “this guy” they know that does an outstanding job of managing their money, I can’t help but think of the very long and never ending parade of financial service professionals like this weeks example.
If I recall correctly, it was William Bernstein in The Four Pillars of Investing that, when outlining the perverse incentives that exist within the financial service industry, pointed out that the term service could aptly describe how a bull services a cow.
The sun smiles on Germany
the ROI on LED
Did you do a break even analysis yet? How long will it take you to recoup the expense?
The way to calculate break even (or Return On Investment) is to know roughly how much each bulb costs to use. To determine that, I built a spreadsheet that listed all 49 light fixtures in my house, the number of bulbs in each fixture, watts per bulb, lumens, and the estimated hours of monthly use. From that list, I picked the 24 most expensive bulbs to operate and replaced them with LEDs, at the cost of $217.
Conclusions:
- Halogen track lights are horrifically inefficient. Replace immediately.
- Old transformers are terribly inefficient. Replace immediately.
- LED track light bulbs are hard to find locally and horrifically expensive. Instead, buy direct from China.
- Considering their lumen output, 4′ fluorescent bulbs aren’t that bad
- The ROI is usually less than a year for bulbs used more than an hour a day
For the bulbs in my “top 24” list, the ROI period was less than 12 months, and that was purchasing the bulbs at late 2012 prices. Today I can buy most of those bulbs for about 30% less, so the ROI is even faster. Today at Costco, I purchased 850 lumen dimmable LED bulbs for $8 each.
Also consider that many of the bulbs I replaced were CFL. The savings in going from CFL to LED are much lower than when switching from incandescent, lowering my ROI. But the instant on, dimming, and improved light quality of LED bulbs make the switch worth while.
What LED’s do you recommend?
I recommend whatever LED bulbs cost about $10 for 850 or more lumens. I would buy them only at a local store with a good return policy. Out of 40 bulbs, I’ve had two fail. At $10/ea, they cost just enough that it’s worth taking them back for an exchange.
It’s worth noting that both my bulb failures were on the same power circuit as the 12v track lights, and I suspect the 12v power transformer played a role in their failures.
Did you bypass CFL altogether?
We used many CFL bulbs from 2009-2012. The light quality of the earliest ones was quite awful, so we confined them to areas where that didn’t matter. Price was never an issue, as Seattle City Light subsidizes them: a 6-pack of CFL bulbs has cost $1 for years now. As CFL bulb quality improved, CFL bulbs found their way into more rooms. But unlike LED bulbs, they never became good enough that we liked them.
eGallon
The eGallon is a new and more comprehensible way to compare the fuel costs of gas versus electric cars. The eGallon is the cost of driving an electric car the equivalent distance that a gas powered car would travel on 1 gallon of gas.
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, here in the Northwest an eGallon costs $0.84 versus gasoline at $3.87 per gallon. In most states, the cost per eGallon is about 1/3 that of gasoline. If the Chevy Volt and Nissan Leaf didn’t have $10,000 price premiums, one of our cars would be electric.
LED light bulbs
The graph above from Seattle City Light shows 12 months of our household electric usage (Jun-May). Each bar is 2 months, so the first is Jun-Jul and the last is Apr-May. The lighter colored left bar is the prior years usage, and the darker colored right bar is the current year (Jun 2012-May 2013) usage. Can you guess in which 2-month period I replaced all our light bulbs with LEDs?
Geeky things to do with DMARC
May 25th edition.
Between 2013-05-24 17:00:00 and 2013-05-25 16:59:59, somebody at the United States Army base in Fort Huachuca, Arizona (home of the “U.S. Army Intelligence Center and the U.S. Army Network Enterprise Technology Command (NETCOM)/9th Army Signal Command”) attempted to forge an email to a Yahoo email address purporting to be from my domain cadillac.net.
I discovered this while testing the report analysis tools in Mail::DMARC, my nearly complete implementation of DMARC. DMARC is a nifty bit of tech where mail server operators (in this case, Yahoo!) report message delivery information to domain owners (in this case, me). In this case, Yahoo received the non-conforming message attempt from IP 141.116.211.97, which resolves to host-141-116-211-97.ptr.hqda.pentagon.mil. GeoIP locates the IP at:
US, AZ, Fort Huachuca, 85613, 31.527300, -110.360703, 789, 520.
Because the message didn’t conform to my published DMARC policy, Yahoo rejected it and reported information about the attempt to me. To rule out the possibility of this being a legit message being forwarded, I checked my logs and found zero messages being sent from that domain during the time period. I’d be quite curious to hear an explanation for this attempt.
Google Checkout being put out to pasture
“As we continue to build the Wallet platform, we must focus our priorities. That is why we are announcing today that we will retire Google Checkout….on Nov 20, 2013.”