Category: Mikes Rants

I pay $112.00 a month for Dish Network Satellite TV but I still have to sit through 15 minutes of TV Commercials for every half hour of programming and on top of that the TV commercials are loud as hell.  So basically I’m paying to be annoyed. Did I mention that of the 400+ channels I receive I only watch three? CNN, Discovery and History. When I called and asked if I could just pay for the three channels they told me to go fly a kite so I’m stuck paying for a lot of crap I don’t use.

To be fair to Dish Network I believe the same can be said for most TV no matter who your service provider is. I bet if Americans agreed to quit watching for a week we could force the programmers to change their evil ways but what are the chances of Americans ungluing themselves from the tube for more than a few hours? Not a chance, they have us where they want us. Fat dumb and glued to the couch.

Tonight I start my personal protest. No TV for a month. I’ll let you know how it goes.

I need to send a fax but my Hewlett Packard printer/fax machine tells me I am low on Magenta Ink and won’t let me send it.  WTF? You don’t need printer ink to send a fax.

Thanks HP,  for sending me out in the snow to buy another overpriced ink cartridge.

To sell a product at most larger retailers in the USA you need a UPC Bar Code on your product.  Unfortunately there is only one company that controls the UPC Bar codes that the majority of these retailers require.  Anytime you have one company controlling an entire market you have a monopoly. Why is this a bad thing? Because this company can charge what ever they want for their product.  The UPC Barcode technology is nothing spectacular, the databases of product are also nothing very high tech yet this single company has its tentacles on almost every product sold in the USA. What type of prices are we talking about? My sister and I have a small Natural Soap company. This UPC Bar Code company wants $1000 to register and another $200 a year just for our small mom and pop company. As a company gets larger they charge additional fees.  This company does not print your UPC label for you, they don’t help advertise your product all they do is issue you a bar code and put you in a database and for this they want $1000 up front and $200 a year for the rest of the products life.  This certainly seems like highway robbery to me when I’ll build you an entire website and host it for a year for less than $1000 and spend a few weeks working on it. This company charges $1000 to click a few keys, issue you a code and transfer your product info into a database and then another $200 a year to keep you in the database. By the way the $1000 setup and $200 a year is just for the smallest of companies, larger companies pay significantly more.  To learn more about the UPC Barcode Monopoly take a look at their website.