Standard Mischief

Thanks to this post at Consumerist.com, I find out that 86% of milk sellers in New York City are price-gouging customers! By a whole 40 or 50 cents per gallon!

So there’s a state goverment set price on goods like milk? Does that set price take in consideration the cost of higher overhead in a major metropolitan area? Who the hell is channeling Hugo Chávez anyway?

Select comments:

dabusdriver

When almost all the milk retailers are charging the higher “gouging” price, you would think that’s because the market costs of the milk inputs overall have risen, and not because any single retailer is trying to make a quick buck.

Why doesn’t NY state just set fixed prices for everything, in order to join the great consumer paradises of North Korea, Zimbabwe and Venezuela. Let me know how that works out.

Keavy_Rain

So how exactly are consumers being “price gouged” here? Who determines the fair price for a gallon of milk in New York?

You’d think supply and demand would set prices, but it is an election year and we gotta detract the masses from the important issues with stupid stuff like this.

czarandy

Next month on Consumerist:
Milk shortages hit New York City

punkrawka

Glad to see that Consumerist commenters have some understanding of economics, even if Consumerist editors don’t.

You’re doing it wrong.

Google-fu – noun

1. The ability to use Google with zen like prowess.
2. A measure of one’s level of skill in using the Google search engine in order to find needed but near worthless minutia.

Etymology: A portmanteau of the search engine Google and kung fu.

Compare Google Juice [1] [2] [3] or The nofollow attribute [1] [2]

I think I’ve passed on a bit of slang that I absorbed via osmosis from JMPP*, but usage has mutated. This is an attempt to correct that. I can has meme.

* plus seekret fifth name.

Yep, it’s coming down to which way the superdelegates decide to vote because neither candidate currently has enough of the “voted by the people” delegates to win. Those superdelegates, the Democratic Noblemen and Women, can flip, or flop, or take thinly veiled bribes, or jocky for the best overseas diplomatic prestige post, or demand pork for their district, or whatever all the way up to the Denver convention. The whole country has now become a smoke-filled back-room. The party of the downtrodden, the discriminated and the disenfranchised ought to be real proud right about now.

Undoubtedly there are people out there who whined about Jon Kerry allegedly winning the popular vote now poo-pooing any claims by Hillary for arguably doing the exact same thing in the primaries.

There’s also some fight left in the seating of the Florida and Michigan delegates.

It’s not over by a long shot until after Denver.

I’ve been dragging my feet for a while now on this, but I’ve decided to “seize the day” as it looks like everyone on my RSS aggravater who has the a free Blogger blog is currently throwing a 502 “Bad gateway” error code.

So here’s a total breakdown of how much my blog cost me over the last 365 days. All expenses are included less the cost of my own labor. My host is Nearly Free Speech, who have a “pay as you go system”. Costs are deduced a penny at a time for exactly what services you need.

Domain name: $7.99/year

You don’t have to use Nearly Free Speech’s domain services, as third party DNS works too. Heck, you don’t even need a domain name, as long as you are fine with a name like http://your-really-cool-name-here.nfshost.com/.

RespectMyPrivacy.COM Service: $3.65/year

You really don’t need this if you don’t have a domain, or you don’t want to bother keeping your legit personal info off your domain registration. This is a penny per day expense, and can be invoked and canceled at any time.

If you want private registration, it’s worth it to only using the domain services here even if you host elsewhere. By far better terms than over at Go Daddy or any other place I’ve seen.

mySQL surcharge: $3.65/year

Most blog software and many applications require this. It’s only a penny a day for a process, and that one process can actually be spread over several blogs. While you get only one process, you can create an unlimited number of databases.

Bandwidth: $3.31/year

That’s for 3,337,476,262 bytes of data sent out to blog readers in a year. There’s also no limit to the number of sites that you can create. It’s actually pretty easy to create a new site just for messing around with.

Storage charge: $6.53/year

I’m currently using 40,665,088 bytes of storage. The cost reflects a four sample per day average and is billed daily (unless you use less than a penny’s worth – then they will just wait until you do use a penny’s worth and bill you) Honestly, most of this is log files. It used to be higher, but I’ve pressed the gizmo on the panel to rotate my logs weekly and compress them. I suppose I could also toss the really old ones to save a few bucks per year, but I’m not really pressed.

WordPress installation via Subversion: Free

Just a command on the command line and the latest stable version of blogging software is installed on my account. After editing one configuration file, I’m up and running.

Support: Free

Every active account gets free tech support via email. I can attest for the two support requests that I have initiated, both were read by a competent employee and I got a prompt. non-canned, non-copypasta, personal, useful reply. You are expected to know what you are doing, there’s very minimal hand-holding. There’s an excellent support forum too, just in case you have any questions not related to actual hosting.

$7.99
$3.65
$3.65
$3.31
+$6.53

Total: $25.13 for the last year of service. Eleven bucks and change of this is because I wish to have a really cool domain name and I want to have it managed by my host.

My old host was $4 per month or $48 per year (which is actually pretty cheap.) Domain names and privacy was extra. Their plan had a bazillion GB of bandwidth and storage, but as a use it or lose it type of scheme. The business model here is to oversell the service and crowd a large number of accounts on to one server. If everyone wanted to use their full allotment of bandwidth or storage, the server would run out of resources, (and everyone would likely be either “fired” as a customer or forced into a higher tier contract.) Since moving, my site seems to load a lot faster, but I don’t have any hard data to back that statement up.

Sure it’s not for everyone, and there are a few quirky shortcomings, but if you are comfortable running a site on a FreeBSD server, this is probably faster, better and cheaper than anything else out there. As for myself, besides being a cheap bastard, hosting my blog and a few side projects here has been a tremendous learning opportunity.

I don’t even keep a bookmark to Egalia’s Tennessee Guerilla Women blog, but she’s there in the mental index file if I ever need a fringe far left viewpoint on feminist issues. I went over there recently and noted that the Feminists for Hillary faction is ticked off. You can browse over there if you want the details.

Anyway, one thing she mentions is a speech from the Honorable Rep. Alcee Hastings where he plays the race card, badly. I know that Rep. Hastings isn’t cribbing from me because he says “2/3 of a person” instead of “Three Fifths”:

“…I suppose the DNC has the right to block Democrats in Florida from attending the National Convention. They also have the right to be stupid, and stupid they are. At the beginning of our great country’s history my ancestors were counted as only 2/3 of a person. Until passage of the 15th Amendment in 1870, they weren’t allowed to vote. During that same time and until 1920, women could not vote. White men who did not own property could not vote at one point in our history as well…”

He’s a sharp one there.

Also here’s a comment from the last link above:

A true ironist might point out that Hastings was one of 31 in Congress who voted to not count the electoral votes of Ohio in 2004.

This is what I love about this year’s race to be the Democratic Nominee in particular and politics in general. An extra heapin’ helpin’ of hypocrisy for everyone!